Reviewed by Jonathan D. Sassi | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3

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Reviewed by Jonathan D. Sassi | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards. By Douglas A. Sweeney. Religion in America Series. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 255. $45.00.) Reviewed by Jonathan D. Sassi , College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Douglas A. Sweeney builds upon the last quarter-century of scholarship on the New Divinity movement, the theology developed by Jonathan Edwards's followers such as Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, to provide a fresh interpretation of Nathaniel William Taylor. During the late 1820s and early 1830s, Connecticut's Congregational clergy split into Taylorite and Tylerite factions, so-called after their eponyms, Nathaniel William Taylor and Bennet Tyler. The Tylerites denounced Taylor's New Haven Theology for having made heretical departures from the strict bounds of Hopkinsian orthodoxy, which had reigned as the evangelical standard in southern New England since the 1790s. Sweeney returns to the acrimonious Taylor-Tyler debates, finding that Taylor was not the Old Calvinist or Arminian that his accusers and many subsequent historians have made him out to be. Rather, Taylor was a product of Connecticut's Edwardsian theological tradition that was nurtured by the New Divinity followers of Jonathan Edwards. As Taylor himself claimed, his theological priorities all followed Edwards's, and his innovations were all extensions of the master's themes.	1
Sweeney situates Taylor as a product of New Divinity culture in Part 1. He notes that Taylor prepped for Yale with the New Divinity preacher Azel Backus. Thus, Taylor's principal early influence was Edwardsian. At Yale he experienced conversion through the ministrations of President Timothy Dwight and graduated with the class of 1807. He spent two additional years studying under Dwight, thereby receiving an indelible Edwardsian stamp, and spent the rest of his life in New Haven, first as pastor of the Center Church from 1812 to 1822 and then as professor in Yale's "Theological Department" (p. 56) from 1822 until his death in 1858.	2
Part 2 examines Taylor's theology in light of his New Divinity background. Sweeney, like other scholars of New Divinity theology, is indebted to Yale University Press's Works of Jonathan Edwards (23 vols. to date [New Haven, Conn., 1957–]), which has allowed unprecedented access into the intricacies of Edwards's thought. Sweeney also mines the theological journals in which the various theological camps waged debate. Three chapters each consider an aspect of Taylor's Calvinism: his doctrines of original sin, God's moral government, and regeneration. On each point, Taylor started out trying to defend Edwardsian Calvinism from attacks on the left by Arminians, Unitarians, and other liberal critics. His overall goal was to maintain an intellectually defensible theology of revival appropriate for the Second Great Awakening.	3
On original sin, Taylor tweaked "the emblematically Edwardsian distinction between the natural and moral ability to obey God" (p. 31), which had been Edwards's way of responding to liberal criticism that Calvinists put humankind in the impossible position of being required but utterly unable to obey God's laws. Taylor dispensed with the troublesome word "inability" and substituted the phrase "certainty without necessity" (p. 75), by which he meant that it was certain that sinners would not repent on their own without God's grace, although there was no inborn "necessity" that prevented them from doing so. By the "moral government" of God, Taylor meant that God was good, merciful, just, and orderly and that sinners could thereby put their trust in him. This doctrine responded to liberal criticisms that the Calvinist God arbitrarily predestined some but not most, and it also jibed with the broader, republican culture of post-Revolutionary America by sounding notes of constitutional order and virtue. On the matter of "regeneration," Taylor again extended an Edwardsian theme, the call for "immediate repentance" (p. 31), by arguing that "self-love" (p. 114) could motivate sinners to save themselves and accept God's gracious offer.	. . .

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