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.Abbott began his odyssey as a Presbyterian; his wife was a strict “praying woman”of the same denomination.He recalled that his visions began with a dream of himself in hell, where giant scorpions repeatedly stung him with tails nearly six feet long.A few weeks later, he dreamed of standing before God in heaven and hearing him say, “Benjamin, this place is not for you yet.”After these wake-up calls, he backslid into his sinful ways, which caused him to revert to his familiar anxiety.He became increasingly desperate:“Being brought up in the doctrine of election and reprobation, I concluded that I should be damned, do what I could.” He imagined the devil lurking at every turn: “my hair arose on my head through fear.” Days passed, and losing all appetite, he threw his food to the dog.The turning point came one day in October 1772, when Christ himself appeared to him and said, “I died for you.” In that moment of tearful catharsis, “the Scriptures were wonderfully opened to my understanding.” Christ further instructed him that “[y]oumust join the Methodists, for they are my people, and they are right.”45Emboldened by such a miraculous refutation of Calvinism, Abbott went back to his wife and told her that “she had no religion, and was nothing more than a strict Pharisee.” This indelicate announcement prompted her to seek advice from her pastor, who sent her back with a copy of “Bellam-ey’s New Divinity,” namely, True Religion Delineated (1750) by Jonathan Edwards’s disciple Joseph Bellamy.“I read it about half through and found him a rigid predestinarian,” Abbott noted.46 The next day, Abbott reluctantly agreed to the minister’s request for a meeting, which left him mired anew in anxiety about his eternal state.Progressing once more to a spiritual 112Predestinationclimax, Abbott heard the Lord speak to him: “Why do you doubt? Is not Christ all-suffi cient?” This new theophany turned Abbott’s distress into raptures of joy: “I then sprang upon my feet, and cried out, not all the devils in hell, nor all the predestinarians on earth, should make me doubt; for I knew that I was converted.” Amazingly, however, Abbott found himself a few days later succumbing yet again to temptations until fi nally he resolved to compare the Bible with the Westminster and Baptist confessions until he settled his doubts.“I found the Bible held out free grace to all, and for all, and that Christ tasted death for every man, and offered gospel salvation to all: therefore, I could not bear those contracted partial doctrines of unconditional election and reprobation.” He threw the confessions aside and continued reading the Bible straight through, from Genesis to Revelation, “by which time, I was well armed with arguments against the predestinarians.”Confi rmed at last in his decision to become a Methodist, he continued to take his wife to the new sect’s meetings until, under the infl uence of another preacher, she repented of her pharisaical ways and became a willing Methodist too, restoring the couple to wedded bliss.“These were the beginningof days to us,” Abbott exulted.47While Abbott’s memoir enjoyed a remarkable shelf life among a popular readership, some Methodist leaders began to see the need to confront the Calvinists in the academic arena.Nathan Bangs (1778–1862), who rose to become head of the Methodist Book Concern in New York City, typifi ed this new concern for scholarly respectability as the Methodist movement gained institutional strength after 1800.48 Though not a college graduatehimself, he took a dim view of the “ill-digested effusions” of unlettered exhorters and recognized the polemical advantage that Calvinists gained from their long tradition of an educated ministry.49 Calvinists could portray their predestinarianism as grounded in cool reason, whereas Methodists too often appeared hot-headed and irrational.Consequently, in his early polemical efforts, Bangs turned the tables.In a reply to an attack on the Methodists by the Congregational minister Daniel Haskel, a Yale graduate who would serve three years as president of the University of Vermont before suffering a mental breakdown, Bangs insisted that the unconditional predestination taught by Haskel and other Calvinists was neither scriptural nor rational.Bangs invoked John Wesley’s claim that no passage of scripture could prove Calvinism’s “horrible decree,” which rendered Christ a hypo-crite and Paul a liar for claiming that God “will have all men to be saved”(1 Tim.2:4).Bangs also ridiculed Haskel’s argument, standard among Calvinists, that humans were free, and therefore responsible for their sins, even while their eternal destinies were fi xed.This was like saying that both the earth-centered and sun-centered models of the solar system were true and From Methodists to Mormons113“we must all believe it.”50 The worst offenders in perpetuating this dubiouscompatibilism were “those rigid predestinarians, who inhabit the eastern and northern sections of our country,” by which Bangs meant the New Divinity successors of Jonathan Edwards: Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and their disciples.Haskel had internalized the vocabulary of this school as a student at Yale under president Timothy Dwight.51 Bangs attacked the tradition more fully in The Errors of Hopkinsianism (1815), which sold 3,000copies in six months—a testament to the New Divinity’s wide currency at the time among college-educated ministers and their fl ocks.52METHODISTS VERSUS NEW ENGLAND CALVINISTSIndeed, the “New England theology,” as the evolving New Divinity came to be known by the mid-nineteenth century, emerged as a classic American attempt to reconcile human freedom with divine determinism, and it became a major target of Methodist anti-Calvinism.53 The New Englandproject extended for a century, from its leading light, Jonathan Edwards, to his namesake Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900), professor at the Congregationalists’ Andover Seminary (founded in 1807 in opposition to Unitar-ian-dominated Harvard).54 Central to this “consistent Calvinism” (another nickname of the movement) was Edwards’s distinction, developed in Freedom of the Will (1754), between natural and moral ability.55 Under normal circumstances, people had a natural ability to obey God and repent, meaning that in the absence of physical or mental impairment or some external coercion, their minds and bodies were fully capable of turning to Christ.Moral ability referred to what people did by free choice of their wills, which was inseparable from the psychological inclinations or dispositions governing their choices.A person inclined toward sin lacked the moral ability to choose Christ.But because the sinner’s refusal to convert was entirely due to his own unwillingness, and not due to any natural inability, he was fully responsible for his actions.As one New England theologian put it, “sinners can do what they certainly will not do [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]