| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform. By Leo P. Hirrel. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. x, 248 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-8131-2061-6.)

This small book has a thesis: that what Leo P. Hirrel calls New School Calvinism provided the ideology that best supported several antebellum reform efforts. Unfortunately, the label "New School Calvinism" remains elusive. Hirrel first identifies it with the complex Calvinist theology of Nathaniel W. Taylor. He summarizes, without originality or probing insights, Taylor's system and then locates it between the more traditional Calvinism entrenched at Princeton and the more radical perfectionism of Charles Finney. By New School Calvinism, Hirrel refers beyond Taylor's theology to several prominent New School Presbyterians or Congregationalists who were at least sympathetic to Taylor's humanistic and reasonable version of Calvinism. Those ministers reflected a distinctive New School Calvinist mentality, one that motivated various reform efforts. Hirrel does not unravel the perplexities that still surround Taylor's use of the image of God as a perfect moral governor as a way of dealing with the problem of evil. Neither does he judge whether Taylor remained loyal to all the defining doctrines of Calvinism. He believes he did. His more traditional critics viewed him as a closet Arminian. . . .

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