The GOSPEL TRUTH

A GENETIC HISTORY OF THE

NEW ENGLAND THEOLOGY

By

FRANK HUGH FOSTER

1907

 CHAPTER XII:

The Systems Of Theology, 1800-1840

The attention of the student of New England theology, though it is occupied again and again with the strife of public controversy, is ever recalled from the noise of debate and the glare of publicity to the quiet of some retired study in which an obscure minister, a laborious professor, or a peaceful thinker is doing the real work of promoting the progress of the school. We must now retrace our steps, go back again to about the beginning of the century into whose struggles we have so far penetrated, and study the quiet labor which was embodied in the systems of theology which were created in those early years, and which may be called the second generation of such creations in New England. They were systems, or the products of consistent and comprehensive thought; they were remarkably independent in their character; but they were prepared in full knowledge of what men were disputing upon, and register the matured conclusions of their authors upon the controverted topics. They are in this sense conditioned upon the controversies, even where they give little definite evidence of such a connection. They could not well be understood at an earlier point, but they must now be introduced, for without them the later controversies will also be unintelligible.

The first of these systems in the historical order of its origination is that of Nathaniel Emmons. It was not put forth by its author; it was never written in the literary form of a treatise, and has been given to us in the original sermons preached by its author in his ordinary labors as a parish minister; it has thus the defects of repetition, of incomplete statement at many points, of limitation to the necessities of popular address, incident to the sermonic form. But it is, nevertheless, sufficiently complete; and so far as specimens of logical and powerful reasoning are concerned it could not be improved if it had been prepared in a more ideal way. As it appears, it is a system almost entirely rationalistic in its tone and method, though in his own mind it was a biblical system. But little reading of it is required to show that a true inductive method of exegesis was unknown to Emmons, and that, when he had got clearly in his mind what he thought to be the meaning of the Bible in general, and had adjusted it to other truths in a way that seemed reasonable, no single text had any chance for an objective interpretation from him. The general effect of his style of presenting truth is to make the hearer boldly and exclusively rationalistic.

One marked defect of the system as a system might have been remedied if Emmons had written a systematic treatise, though this is perhaps doubtful. This is the absence of a clear statement of his philosophic position. On some points he seems to have had no philosophy, for he evidently had a profound horror of ontology, in this respect quite anticipating the attitude characteristic of the last half of the last century. Did he believe in a substantial soul? His language is here and there against it. Did he even believe in the reality of the external world, or was he a thoroughgoing Berkeleian? A clear word upon such points would scarcely have failed us, had he been writing for more than the exigency of a present moment. Now and then the suspicion assails us that he had really resolved all things into the present thought of the divine Being. He has not said.

Professor Park, in the remarkable "Memoir" which he prefixed to the last edition of Emmons' works, in which he writes as a friend, admirer, and defender, but not as a blind partisan, has done much to clear up these questions. He recognizes the phenomenological dress in which the theology appears, when he vindicates Emmons from the charge of having taught the mode in which God secures the fulfillment of his decrees. Dr. Jacob Ide, the original editor of Emmons' works, and his son-in-law, quoting from Rev. Thomas Williams, long and intimate friend of Emmons, says that Williams said "he conversed with the doctor particularly on this subject [Berkeleianism] and was told by him that he read the work of Berkeley and was at first much perplexed with it, but when he read it a second time, he saw its fallacy and thought he could answer it." He thus broke away from the Berkeleianism which had hitherto characterized the New England school, and we should scarcely suppose that he could hold the idea that the soul is a mere series of exercises. The truth seems to be that his forms of expression are designed to emphasize the spirituality of the soul, its activity as essential to its nature, and the fact that moral character consists in activity and voluntariness. On the other hand, there are not lacking passages which speak of the soul distinctly as an agent, possessing powers, and itself a substance. Upon the whole, we are justified in assuming that Emmons held the philosophy of the unsophisticated man upon such points, and the more because we know him to have been familiar with the early leaders of the Scotch school--Reid, Stewart, and Brown. The time had not come, however, for the distinct transfer of our theology to the new philosophical basis.

Emmons regarded himself as a Hopkinsian; and with this statement we may dismiss the consideration of a considerable portion of his system. The leading idea is the sole causality of God, which is pushed to such an extreme that, though room is made for freedom by a bold adherence to it as a fact of consciousness, consistency would lead rather to a denial of all freedom. A very prominent topic is "moral agency," in which agency is made to consist in "exercises," and this point of view, with the divine causality kept constantly in mind, determines most that is striking in the system. Like Hopkins, he maintains the historic faith of the church in the divine Trinity; in the two natures of Christ, human and divine; in the inspiration of the Scriptures; in human depravity; in atonement, justification, sanctification; and in the future punishment of the wicked. Furthermore, as to the leading explanatory, systematizing positions and theories of Hopkins, he demonstrably is, or may safely be assumed to be, in accord with his predecessor. He himself regarded the peculiarities of his system as "evolved from Hopkins' system rather than as added to it." Yet he is individual where he agrees, and cannot always be dispatched with a mere reference to his master.

Emmons did much service in the earlier stages of many of the great controversies which have already passed under our review. Settled in the ministry in the year 1773, he was in the full height of his power when the infidel tendencies which originated with the influence of the French in the War of the Revolution became evident in the last decade of the eighteenth century. In 1793 he was printing against Hume. The Antinomianism of an earlier period had also attracted his attention and roused his efforts. In 1789 he had published against the antagonism to creeds already manifesting itself, and had tersely said: Men do not "object against creeds because they do not understand them, but because they do." And two years before West, Edwards, and Smalley had published against Universalism, Emmons had issued his first sermon (1783) against that error.

Nevertheless, we must keep distinctly in mind that in respect to the Trinity and Christology Emmons belongs entirely to the generation which preceded the formal Unitarian controversy, and contributed nothing to its settlement. He was already seventy years of age when the controversy openly broke out in 1815. We may, indeed, say that his modes of representation of the Trinity had had something to do with provoking the controversy, as elsewhere shown. He belonged to that class of theologians who put the mystery of the Trinity, not in the threeness, but in the oneness. This, as Professor Park was in the habit of saying, is a legitimate form of the doctrine; but it generally leads to the charge of tritheism. His Christology was equally incapable of preventing such a movement as the Unitarian from arising, and of meeting it when it had arisen; for it had no helpful word to justify the doctrine of the personal union of the two natures. In fact, he gives it utterly up.

The question still recurs, what is meant by Christ's being one person in two natures? I answer, the man Jesus, who had a true body and a reasonable soul, was united with the second person in the Trinity, in such a manner as laid a foundation for him to say with propriety that he was man, that he was God, and that he was both God and man; and as laid a foundation also to ascribe what he did as God and suffered as man, to one and the selfsame person. If any should here ask, how could his two natures be thus personally united? We can only say, it is a mystery. And there is no avoiding a mystery with respect to Christ. His conception was a mystery. And if we admit the mystery of his conception, why should we hesitate to admit the mystery of the personal union between his two natures? If we only admit this, all Christ said concerning himself is easy and intelligible. Being a man, he might with propriety make himself God.

The italicized words show how essentially Nestorian Emmons' doctrine was.

The doctrine of inspiration advocated is that of suggestion. "God . . . not only directed them to write, but at the same time suggested what to write; so that according to the literal sense of the text, they wrote exactly as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." The argumentation in support of this position is exclusively rational and a priori. Not a particle of attention seems to have been paid to the facts pertaining to the theme.

Passing, now, to the distinctive tenets of Emmons, we have the great advantage of possessing an enumeration of them by Emmons himself, which we shall follow in the ensuing pages. They are eight in number.

1. "Holiness and sin consist in free voluntary exercises." We have already seen that Emmons belonged to the tendency in our theology which emphasized the sole agency of God till it had excluded any proper agency in man. True, Emmons affirmed a real agency in man, and said that it was as real and perfect as if the agency of God had nothing to do with it; but he really removed it when he spoke of God's "creating" our volitions. Be that, however, as it may, we are to note now that he made holiness and sin to consist in "exercises." Hence he consistently rejected the doctrine of a sinful nature, for "there is no morally corrupt nature distinct from free, voluntary, sinful exercises;" as well as the doctrine of our union with Adam in his sin, and every imputation of his guilt to us. "Adam was the only person who committed and who was guilty of original sin." In all this he was only somewhat more clear and positive in his statements than other New England divines.

With the word "exercises," however, is connected a controversy which this is the most convenient place to notice, that about the "exercise" and the "taste" schemes.

The process of regeneration will be understood differently according to the different theories which are held as to the nature of mind and of moral action. The exercise controversy arose from these differences; but, strange as it may seem, both parties agreed for a considerable time in respect to the element of the controversy which was more important than those upon which they differed, and which had to be modified before a conclusion could be reached; viz., as to the agency of God. Both held that this was immediate, and an act of his almighty power.

Hopkins himself, in accordance with the somewhat undefined theory of the will which he held, distinguished between regeneration and conversion, as between the divine and the human action. The Holy Spirit puts forth a causative activity, the effect of which is the "exercises of the regenerate in which they are active and agents." The Spirit works immediately upon the heart, without means, and produces an instantaneous change in it. The word "heart" here is used in the sense of will. The understanding, considered as distinct from the will, is not the spat of this operation, because it is not disordered, or only so as the disorder of the will is the cause of the disorder in it. Regeneration is not by light or truth, but the light appears and the truth is perceived by the mind after regeneration. It is a change in which the subject is not conscious of the divine operation; and it is perfectly consistent with human liberty, "leaving men in the exercise of all desirable or possible freedom." "The right exercises of the new heart . . . are as much their own and as free as if they had taken place without any divine influences, were this possible." Upon regeneration conversion follows. It is "turning from sin to God . . . holy exercise which is true love to God . . . which implies sight and belief of the truth, repentance, faith in Christ, and submission to him."

The meaning of Hopkins is sufficiently clear in the main, but it was not stated with that crystalline clearness and positiveness with which Emmons loved to see every theological proposition enunciated. Hopkins had implied there was a holy act of the will before repentance. He proceeded therefore to "evolve" Hopkins' true meaning. There is, according to Emmons, no true difference between regeneration, conversion, and sanctification. They are all the production of holy exercises in the hearts of sinners in the same way. This God does by an immediate act of power. Sometimes he strives with sinners, and produces conviction, etc., uses means. But all this does not effect regeneration. In this God produces holy love. He makes the heart willing. This is the first act of the regenerated will. It is repentance, not some mysterious thing on which repentance follows. Emmons also combats the idea that there is planted in the heart a new taste, disposition, or principle which is prior to all holy exercises and the foundation of them. The heart that is renovated is the will. Hence the sinner is not passive in regeneration at all. He is indeed as active in this as in any other exercise, for God "always works in [men] both to will and to do in all their free voluntary exercises," religion constituting no special sphere by itself in this matter, since men's "activity in all cases is owing to a divine operation upon their minds." Thus he follows out logically the division of the mind into two faculties, intellect and will, and the doctrine of the sole divine causality. His answer to the supposition that the taste is affected before conversion, and that the latter is caused thereby, is, in fact, that there is no such taste, independent of the will, to be thus affected.

Such a view of regeneration was as certain to be opposed as the theory, or lack of theory, of the will upon which it was based. The "taste scheme" received a powerful reinforcement when Asa Burton came on with those improvements in the classification of the faculties of the mind which were ultimately to work so great a revolution in the theory of the will. In his twenty-ninth Essay, "On Regeneration," he dwells first upon the necessity of regeneration. This he derives from the fact that unregenerated men are not fit for heaven, having no relish for its delights. Christians must have benevolent love as God has it, and, since it is no mere exercise in him, but a principle, so men must have a principle, appetite, relish, or disposition for happiness as an absolute good. Burton then passes on to the nature of regeneration. "It is a new creation. That which is created is the "appetite, relish, or disposition to be pleased with divine objects." This work is effected by the Holy Spirit instantaneously. It is immediately wrought in the "taste" or sensibility alone, and affects the other faculties mediately. From the new appetites proceeds a new train of volitions according to the necessary connection of the volitions with the taste. It would seem as if Burton agreed with the rest of his contemporaries in teaching that God wrought this change by an exercise of his divine power! It should be added that he does not lay much stress upon the volitions, but speaks at considerable length of the effect of renewal upon the heart or taste itself. This is the more natural because he makes the taste the "spring of action" and the "principle of virtue." He thus presents apparently a polar opposition to Emmons.

According to Smalley, regeneration is not necessary to confer new faculties upon men or to restore old ones, to confer the power of will, or to produce a sufficient conscience; but it is necessary to give a good disposition. It is immediate and supernatural. Like Hopkins, he rejected the idea of a special illumination which should lead to regeneration.

Emmons made what he deemed a conclusive reply to these considerations. The relish for good, he said to his opponents, which you demand as a condition of repentance is a feeling of complacence in holiness. But a being cannot "see the divine beauty and excellence of benevolence before he has felt it in his own breast." "Hence benevolence will produce complacence, but complacence will not produce benevolence." He elsewhere says: Sin is hating God. Can a man have a relish for the holiness of God while he hates him? The hate must first be put away, and then the relish will follow; or the change in the will must precede a change in the affections. He also objects to the scheme that it makes a man unable to repent until this new taste be given him, which relieves him of moral obligation till that time. And he adds that the law does not require this change in the taste, though it does require that change which shall make us holy.

The time was not come for the conclusion of this controversy; and we dismiss it for the present. Enough has now been said to show what Emmons meant by "free voluntary exercises."

2. "Men act freely under the divine agency." What Emmons meant by "freely" we have now seen. He devoted considerable attention to the discussion of the reconciliation of divine agency with human freedom, and an entire division of his theology was allotted by the editor to this theme. His doctrine may be condensed in his own forms of speech by saying that men both act and are acted upon by a divine operation, in all their voluntary exercises of whatsoever kind. Man cannot act without the divine agency, any more than a stone can move of itself. Hence in the acting of man God also acts. Second causes have no true causality. It is impossible that God should sustain moral agents in the possession of their active powers so that they should act themselves without him.

The meaning of this proposition will be clearer as we proceed. But meantime it may be observed that Emmons did not hold a very complimentary opinion of the treatment of this topic by theologians in general. "The fatalists give up activity for the sake of dependence."

The Arminians, on the other hand, give up dependence for the sake of activity . . . Many of the Calvinists endeavor to steer a middle course between these two extremes, and first give up activity and then dependence, in order to maintain both.

He was thus led to inquire why activity and dependence are so generally thought inconsistent. It is not because of experience.

To believers we make the appeal. Did you ever feel the least inconsistency between activity and dependence? Did you ever perceive the divine agency to obstruct your own? Did you ever find your moral powers suspended in regeneration, in love to God, in repentance, in faith, or in any other holy affection? Were you ever conscious of being less able to grow in grace and to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because God wrought in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure? Should you all speak the language of your own experience upon this subject, we presume you would with one voice declare that the Spirit of the Lord never destroyed, nor even obstructed, your liberty.

It may be said that he does not attempt to reconcile the two elements, the reality of which he is maintaining; but he gives some suggestive hints, if not more than these, in his discussion of the relation of consciousness to the question.

Some may suppose that dependence cannot be reconciled with activity because they are conscious of being active, but not of being dependent . . . They appeal to common sense as an infallible proof that men act freely and voluntarily, without feeling the least compulsion or influence from the hand of God . . . But to what does this dictate of common sense amount? Does it prove that we are not dependent upon the Supreme Being for all our moral exercises? For supposing that God does really work in us both to will and to do, we cannot be conscious of his agency, but only of our own, in willing and doing.

Though activity and dependence are perfectly consistent, yet they are totally distinct; and of course fall under the notice of distinct faculties of the mind. Dependence falls under the cognizance of reason; but activity falls under the cognizance of common sense. It is the part of reason to demonstrate our dependence upon God, in whom we live and move and have our being. But it is the part of common sense to afford us an intuitive knowledge of our activity and moral freedom. We must therefore consult both reason and common sense in order to discover the consistency between activity and dependence. Nor is this a singular case. There are many other objects upon which we can form no proper judgment without the united aid of reason and common sense . . .

If all this is true, you must acknowledge that you have the evidence of reason that you act dependently, that you have the evidence of common sense that you act freely, and that you have the evidence of constant experience that your activity and dependence are entirely consistent. You are therefore as certain of the truth and consistency of your activity and dependence as you can be of any other truth, whose evidence depends upon the united testimony of reason and common sense.

Having thus taught the coexistence of the divine and human agency, it was only necessary for Emmons to add that it extended to every action of man to complete his doctrine. This he does, among other passages, in the following:

If God always works in men both to will and to do, then they are as able to work out their own salvation as to perform the common actions of life. The only reason why sinners suppose they are less able to work out their own salvation than to do the common actions of life is because they imagine that they need more divine assistance in working out their own salvation than in anything else . . . But there is no just ground for this conclusion. They never do act of themselves. They live and move and have their being in God, who constantly works in them both to will and to do in every instance of their conduct. They are as able, therefore, to do right as to do wrong; and to do their duty as to neglect their duty; to love God as to hate God; to choose life as to choose death; to walk in the narrow way to heaven as to walk in the broad way to hell; and to turn from sin to holiness as to perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord.

Yet, after all has been said, the divine causality so overshadows the human as to absorb it. There is no true efficient agency in man. God determines what man shall do, presents motives to him, and excites him to act in view of them. Man's freedom must therefore consist in something different from God's, since God originates and man does not. No amount of assertion and no appeals to consciousness can break the force of these assertions, which are Emmons' own.

It would be a curious investigation to inquire whether determinist views of the action of the will are ever consistent with clear and correct views of what guilt is, as personal responsibility for broken law to God, and repentance, as the confession of guilt. Usually determinists make guilt consist in liability to punishment, and do not distinguish between it and moral deformity. By the same process of depotentiation and obscuration of moral ideas they make repentance nothing more than self-loathing. A deformed person may loathe himself for his ugliness; but when a man who has sinfully incurred his deformity, like an abandoned drunkard, loathes himself, he adds an element which the innocent cripple could not--the element of self-condemnation, of the acknowledgment of guilt, which is compressed into the phrase: "I did it, I brought it upon myself." Perhaps nothing can more clearly reveal the true nature of a man's ethical theories than this question: Does he distinguish between deformity and guilt? When tried by this test Emmons fails. In spite of all his claim, he does not rise to the height of a true "free, voluntary, moral agency;" for guilt, as he describes it, is nothing but disorder or deformity, and repentance nothing but self-loathing. He expressly claims to be loyal to the facts upon both sides of this subject; but he unconsciously abridges the freedom of man.

3. "The least transgression of the divine law deserves eternal punishment."

We have already seen the part our divines took in the discussion of future punishment in connection with the introduction of Universalism into New England. Emmons regarded this element of the argument as his own special contribution. What he meant may be seen by the following extract:

Many imagine that no transient, momentary act of a finite creature can contain such malignity and guilt as to deserve an eternal punishment . . . Sin and guilt are inseparably connected. Guilt can no more be separated from sin than criminality. There is no sin without criminality, and no criminality without guilt or desert of punishment. Therefore both the criminality and guilt of a crime must continue as long as the crime continues, or till it ceases to be a crime and becomes an innocent action. But can murder, for instance, which is a crime in the very nature of things, ever become a virtue? Can time, or obedience, or sufferings, or even a divine declaration, alter its nature, and render it an innocent action? Virtue and vice, sin and holiness, are founded in the nature of things, and so must forever remain immutable. Hence that which was once virtuous will forever be virtuous; that which was once vicious, will forever be vicious; that which was once praiseworthy, will forever be praiseworthy; that which was once blameworthy, will forever be blameworthy; and that which once deserved punishment, will forever deserve punishment. Now, if neither the nature of sin can be changed, nor the guilt of it taken away, then the damned, who have once deserved punishment, will forever deserve it, and consequently God may, in point of justice, punish them to all eternity.

4. "Right and wrong are founded in the nature of things." Emmons was here only restoring the position of Edwards in his Nature of Virtue, which Hopkins had in a measure obscured by his more practical method of treatment, but which he had not forsaken. Edwards founded everything in the ultimate idea of the harmony of the universe; and Hopkins had asserted the agreement of the law of holiness with the highest reason. Calvinism had often developed its idea of the sovereignty of God by applying that sovereignty even to right and wrong, and made these to depend upon the will of God, sometimes upon his "arbitrary"--that is, his sovereign--will uncontrolled from without himself. Emmons said: They do not depend upon his will at all, but are what they are in the nature of things.

God cannot destroy this difference without destroying the nature of things. If he should make a law on purpose to destroy the distinction between virtue and vice, it would have no tendency to destroy it. Or if he should make a law which should forbid us to love him with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves, it would not destroy the obligation of his first and great command.

To support this position, he evidently appeals immediately to the moral intuitions of his hearers, for he says:

No possible alteration in the nature of things can make it our duty to lie, or steal, or murder, or exercise the least malevolence towards our fellow-creatures. This must always be sinful in our world, and in any other world of moral agents.

The importance which he attaches to this principle may be seen from his inferences. The right of private judgment, the possibility of arriving at absolute certainty in morals, the impossibility of thorough skepticism, the importance of correct sentiments, the propriety of a day of judgment, and "that all who go to Heaven will go there by the unanimous voice of the whole universe," are certainly most great and important deductions.

5. "God exercises mere grace in pardoning or justifying penitent believers through the atonement of Christ, and mere goodness in rewarding them for their good works." Hopkins had not fully brought out this idea because his presentation of the atonement, while fully identifying him with the Grotian school, had been incomplete, and his application of it to the system partial. In contemporaries of Emmons we read repeatedly that the atonement makes forgiveness "consistent" with the honor of God, etc. Emmons put it:

If the sole design of Christ's atonement was to satisfy the justice of God toward himself, then he exercises the same free grace in pardoning sinners through the atonement as if no atonement had been made. It has been considered as a great difficulty to reconcile free pardon with full satisfaction to divine justice. The difficulty has arisen from a supposition that the atonement of Christ was designed to pay the debt of sufferings which sinners owed to God. If this were the design of the atonement, it would be difficult to see the grace of God in pardoning sinners on that account. For there is no grace in forgiving a debtor after his debt is paid, whether by himself or by another. But sin is not a debt and cannot be paid by suffering. Christ's suffering in the room of sinners did not alter the nature of their sin nor take away their just deserts of punishment . . . None will deny that it was grace in God to send Christ into the world to make atonement for sin, or that it was grace in Christ to come into the world and suffer and die to make atonement for sin; and it is certain that the atonement he made did not lay God under obligation, in point of justice, to pardon sinners on account of his atonement; it therefore plainly follows that God exercises as real grace in pardoning sinners through the atonement of Christ, as in sending him to make atonement. Free pardon therefore is perfectly consistent with free grace.

6. "Notwithstanding the total depravity of sinners, God has a right to require them to turn from sin to holiness." Emmons here touches upon the subject with which the two remaining peculiarities are connected, the practical matter of conversion and the labors of the evangelist. We must, therefore, add these at once.

7. "Preachers of the gospel ought to exhort sinners to love God, repent of sin, and believe in Christ immediately."

8. "Men are active, not passive, in regeneration."

Emmons' meaning is that the depravity of sinners is a depravity of act, and, since it is moral, lies wholly in the act. Hence, if God can ever require any act of them, he can require their turning from sin to holiness, which consists simply in beginning holy acts. Hence preachers ought to require the same, and nothing else--nothing which is in any way substituted for the one essential and primal act of repentance. And since regeneration does not take place till men act, and consists in creating their holy acts, they, when they are regenerated, act, and only act. He is here but uttering concisely the contention which he had made in opposing the "taste scheme."

Such were the leading positions of Emmons, and these the claims which he would himself have made to the gratitude of posterity. To have sharpened somewhat the statement of important truths, to have brought them thus into clearer light, to have made more consistent and effective the practical labors of ministers in converting men, was to him a source of satisfaction as an adequate aim in life and a sufficient performance.

The "Theological Lectures" of Leonard Woods, first professor of systematic theology at Andover, are remarkable as being the first example of strictly academic lectures in theology issued by the New England divines. Andover Seminary was formed in 1808 by the union of two parties in the evangelical wing of Congregationalism--the "old" or "moderate" Calvinists, and the Hopkinsians, of whom Dr. Emmons was the most eminent representative, and the efficient leader. In deference to the first party, the Westminster Confession was made the credal foundation of the school, and the second party, not for the sake of weakening the authority of the Confession, but to secure its permanent interpretation in a truly orthodox and evangelical sense, added a special creed of their own. To both of these creeds the professor of systematic theology was bound; and the success of the new institution depended upon finding a man for the first professor who could suppose himself to be true to the original creed of the Puritans, while a member of a school of thinkers who had essentially modified it in the process of defending and improving it. Such a man was found in Leonard Woods, who was one of the chief agents in bringing about the establishment of the seminary, and served it with great applause and success till 1846. His position was essentially self-contradictory. He held the main doctrines of Westminster, while rejecting the underlying philosophy of that Confession; and the change in philosophy brought about many a change in details, and many a one which uncompromising supporters of Westminster, like the school at Princeton, must regard as destructive of the system. But this ambiguous position, which perhaps itself rose from the nature of the man--for he created it for himself made him what Professor H. B. Smith called "emphatically the `judicious' divine of the later New England theology." His "Lectures" are marked by comprehensiveness, discussing the whole round of theology, and by a successful avoidance of extremes. They are discursive and explanatory rather than strongly argumentative, and confine themselves to the facts of doctrine, often to the exclusion of explanation. They avoid ontology. In the sense in which Hegel sought to ground theology in the profound truths of spirit and the world, they know nothing of speculation. They are Hopkinsian, and show strong marks of the influence of Emmons; but they do not follow this master into all his peculiarities. They give no evidence of any powerful original thinking, and if they contain new matter, it originated in every case with others. They instructed young men well and prepared them to meet the questions of the day and do their evangelical work with success. Thus they rendered good service in their generation. But they contributed nothing to the progress of theology, and have therefore a very small place in this history.

In respect to the great principles of his system, Woods built it upon the foundation of the Scriptures, which were given by inspiration. Inspiration so operated as to make the Bible a book free from all error. Thus his doctrine of inspiration is "plenary." The argument is wholly from the claims of the Bible itself, and this never seems to Woods to be, what it is, a begging of the whole question. In fact, his argument is substantially this, that the proposed theory is necessary to justify our idea of the Bible. But is that idea correct? Woods neither answers nor considers this question. The placing of the Bible at the head of the system would have enabled him to draw out a more complete doctrine of God, one more permeated with the biblical spirit than was becoming customary in the school; but this advantage he does not utilize. In the Trinity he agrees with his school, laying an Emmonian emphasis upon the separateness of the persons, thus departing from Stuart, whose favorite word "distinction" he rejects as inadequate. He agrees with Stuart in the rejection of "eternal generation." The doctrine of decrees--or, as he prefers to call it, God's purposes--is treated with constant reference to methods of popular presentation of it as an obnoxious doctrine. The characteristic of the school to give a large place to the topic of anthropology reappears here, the theory of the will being Burtonian, or a modified Edwardean theory. The atonement is squarely governmental in its statement and theoretical basis, the theory of virtue. But it is stated in the terminology of the older theory, by the device of giving the terms surreptitiously a new meaning. Thus justice is by no means to Woods what it was to Princeton; but this fact must be inferred, for Woods does not frankly state it. The system is brought to its close by discussions of regeneration, justification, eschatology, etc., as to some of which his positions will come up better in other connections.

As Woods may be called the immediate official successor of Emmons as a theologian and theological teacher--for Andover was the outcome of an endeavor to perpetuate the influence of Emmons in a Hopkinsian theological school it will be well to compare his positions explicitly with Emmons' own statement of his distinctive principles given above. As to the first ("holiness and sin consist in free, voluntary exercises") Woods demurred.

Holiness or unholiness belong primarily and essentially to man himself, as an intelligent, moral being, and to his actions secondarily and consequentially. You may ask whether there is anything back of right moral action, that is prior to it. I answer, yes; there is an agent, endued with all necessary moral powers and faculties. And there is something more than an agent, and something more than a moral agent. If the actions are holy, there is a holy moral agent, and if the actions are unholy, there is an unholy agent. It is in reference to this subject that Christ says, "The tree is known by its fruit." . . . The connection between the character of the actions and the character of the agent is invariable. Take an unrenewed sinner, who, according to Scripture, is an enemy to God. What now is necessary in order that he may love God? It is necessary that he should be born again. He, the man, must be created anew; and if he is created anew, it will be unto good works: not that good works must be created, he himself remaining unchanged; but that he must be created anew, and then, as a matter of course, good works will be performed. If a man is regenerated, or made holy, holy affections and acts will follow--he will love and obey God . . . To say that regeneration consists in good moral exercises, that is, in loving God and obeying his commands, seems to me to be an abuse of language. It is as unphilosophical and strange as to say that the birth of a child consists in his breathing, or that the creation of the sun consists in his shining.

Thus he went wholly over to the Burtonian scheme, the "taste" scheme, and taught that God immediately creates in the sinner a new taste for holy things, consequent which he wills to do them.

As to the second ("men act freely under the divine agency"), Woods, while necessarily differing, in consequence of his position as to the taste, in the definition of the divine agency in relation to ours, on the whole adopted a decidedly Emmonian way of defending this position, proving the divine agency from the divine attributes, works, and word, and human freedom from consciousness. As to the third ("the least transgression of the divine law deserves eternal punishment"), Woods, in reply to John Foster, lays emphasis upon our inability to determine what is a just punishment for sin, thus substantially rejecting Emmons' position; while he makes the chief force of his own reply, outside of the scriptural argument (his ultimate proof), to consist in the affirmation that sin will be eternal, and consequently eternal punishment is appropriate. As to the remaining positions, Woods was in substantial agreement with Emmons, the differences only excepted which follow immediately from the difference as to the will already developed.

Chronologically the remaining system, that of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, preceded that of Woods, and the latter writer frequently quotes from Dwight. It was presented to the public in the form in which it was delivered, viz., that of sermons, which were preached before the college audience each Sunday of the college year, the complete course occupying four years in delivery. It was therefore begun about the year 1795, was committed "to writing in 1809, and published in 1818. But in a peculiar degree it represented no special school in the New England divinity, and did not lie in the line, proceeding through Hopkins and Emmons, in which we are to place Woods. It stands largely by itself, and may be appropriately considered by itself, at the close of this collection of early systems.

The position of the author, at the head of the strongest religious institution of the country, in which he had the opportunity of presenting his system to successive generations of students who furnished the most numerous single group of Congregational ministers, gave him a very wide influence as a theologian. The lectures deserved their reputation and their influence, for their learning was ample, their grace of manner considerable, their practical character marked, and their chiefest characteristic their strong common-sense. Free from vagaries of every sort, they often stopped to rebuke vagaries with emphasis. They held strongly to their course, reviewed the great doctrines with comprehensiveness and completeness, and, without the intermixture of much metaphysics, defended the standard positions of Calvinistic orthodoxy as it had been developed in New England by the year 1800. If they contributed little to the further development of the system of New England theology, they did much to hold that development to sound lines; and it was from the sermons of Dwight that Lyman Beecher obtained his theology, as well as one still greater, not only as a defender of the past but as an original mind--N. W. Taylor.

Lacking the creative element, these sermons do not claim a large place in a genetic history of New England theology. They are strongly argumentative so far as the discussion of single doctrines is concerned, but they do not build the whole system from its beginnings, step by step, till all is erected one substantial and linked structure. They begin, it is true, with the existence of God, and go back to the ultimate principle of causality as the foundation of the proof; but though they employed the Scriptures both in this argument and later as the source of much proof, and in fact of the principal, and at times of the exclusive proof of doctrines of the first importance, the Scriptures are themselves nowhere proved--that is, their inspiration and authority established by appropriate and cogent argumentation. This topic was probably remanded to the author's lectures upon the evidences of Christianity, which have never been published.

Dwight's general conformity to the New England school might be shown by illustrating his adherence to the elder Edwards in the outlines of the theory of the will and of the nature of virtue, by showing that he held the governmental theory of the atonement with the younger Edwards, and by exhibiting his tendency to reject the more marked excrescences of the Calvinistic scholasticism, like imputation. It will be enough here to mention these facts.

One of the chief services rendered by this work was its steady and broad antagonism to that tendency in our theology which seemed at one time about to triumph, and to put all agency in God, to the real destruction of human agency. The predecessor and teacher of Taylor, who was to vindicate a true place for man as an agent, ranged himself with Burton and other advocates of the "taste scheme," and rejected both of Emmons' main points, his "exercises" and his exclusive divine agency. He has hardly got fairly into the swing of his discourse before he stops to put in the caveat that "God cannot be proved to be the efficient cause of sin," and in the first volume has a sermon on "exercises." He argues vigorously that the soul is not a "mere succession, or chain, of ideas and exercises." This view is contrary to those natural conceptions of mankind by which every man regards himself as "a being, a substance, an agent, immediately the subject of his own thoughts, and the cause and author of his volitions and actions." "Attributes cannot be conceived to exist independently of substances, or of something in which they inhere." He objects to the view as "destroying personal identity."

An idea is a mere event, having a momentary existence and then perishing forever. Should another idea afterwards exist, exactly resembling it in everything but the period in which it exists, it would not and could not be the same . . . On this plan, therefore, the soul of man has no continued existence, except for an indivisible moment, and is not the same thing which it was the preceding hour, day, or year, but has varied and become an absolutely new soul through every moment which has passed since it was created, and will continue to be a new thing every moment throughout eternity.

There is, then, nothing which can be rewarded or punished by God. Neither guilt nor virtue can exist. The influence of motives is forever gone, being replaced by the "immediate creation" of every volition. And it is rendered impossible for one human being to receive impressions from any other, since to give an impression is to act, and an idea, "a thing, merely passive," cannot act. Regeneration therefore consisted to Dwight in a change of heart which "consists in a relish for spiritual objects communicated to it by the power of the Holy Ghost." This is like Burton; but, whereas Burton was perfectly sure about the connection of this change with the new volitions, Dwight said: "Of the metaphysical nature of this cause [of volitions] I am ignorant." But virtuous volitions as truly and certainly followed this communication of relish as if they were created. Then follow new views of truth, or Hopkins' "illumination."

But there was a new element in this system which demands more careful attention, in the presentation of which Dwight had been anticipated by none of his New England predecessors. He added to the "system of doctrines" a "system of duties" which occupies seventy-two out of the one hundred and seventy-three sermons of the series. It is a complete system of practical ethics.

The general outline of the system of duties is simple. It begins with referring all virtue to the two great commandments upon which all others are dependent, the commandments to love God with all the soul, and one's neighbor as oneself. The Ten Commandments of the Decalogue are next taken up, and all the various Christian virtues derived from these by a process of inference or of logical extension of the literal meaning of the specific commands. Thus, in discussing the "first great commandment," the duties of reverence for God, humility, and resignation are added to the literal obligation to "love" God. The second great commandment leads him to treat of the effects of benevolence upon personal happiness and on public happiness. He then inserts the somewhat remarkable proposition: "that Virtue is founded in Utility." No wonder that he was called a Utilitarian, since he took the name himself, and that the charge of Utilitarianism long attached to the New Haven school. But in the sense in which he used the term he was entirely right when judged by the principles of the "Rightarians," as they have sometimes been called. He meant, in his own words, that "a tendency to produce happiness constitutes the excellence and value of virtue." There was to Dwight, as well as to the other New England theologians, an ultimate good which it was the intuitive obligation of every man to seek to attain. That good he made "happiness." This was the only "ultimate good;" and the only "original cause" of happiness was virtue. Had he defined happiness as the full and normal exercise of all our powers, he would have seen that holiness, as the exercise of the moral powers, was itself happiness; and as the exercise of the noblest of those powers, the highest form of happiness. But he never would have admitted for an instant that any result of malevolence, arising from any new perversity of things, whereby it produced happiness, could justify hating any creature, or constitute such a hate into virtue!

So general is the acceptance with which Dwight's views on practical subjects have met that it is not necessary to follow his discussions into their details. We may therefore leave this majestic figure in our middle history, who was all the greater because he left so little that was peculiar to himself. He powerfully sustained the general work of our theology, and transmitted it buttressed and defended at essential points. That he did this so well as to relieve his successors of the necessity of doing it again gave them the opportunity, which he scarcely had, of exercising the critical and originating faculty and of asking what further errors might be corrected and what further truths introduced.

 

 

 

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