a historian of Jonathan Edwards’s thought, terms Enlightenment latitude—“a new skepticism [after 1725] about rigid orthodoxies and a growing indifference toward old doctrinal confidence.” One result of this Enlightenment latitude was “a growing confidence in human ability and [it] entailed a strong interest in natural religion.” Deists exemplified the new skepticism most forcefully: God created the universe, they said, but he then sat back and watched his handiwork unfold. It was up to man to act, and it was man who was responsible for his actions—not his creator.7
Thus, to its contemporary critics, Calvinism was a dour philosophy that stifled human initiative and ultimately dampened the reform drive in human society. Some modern historians looking at the religious underpinnings of the American Revolution have seen Calvinism in the same light. In Bernard Bailyn’s telling, enlightened Whig thinkers “felt that it was precisely the heavy crust of custom that was weighing down the spirit of man; they sought to throw it off [during the American Revolution] and to create by the unfettered power of reason a framework of institutions superior to the accidental inheritance of the past.” At the opposite end of these forward-looking, enlightened Whigs of the 1770s were “covenant theologians”—Calvinists and Puritans—who “contin[ued] to assume the ultimate inability of man to improve his condition by his own powers.” For Nathan O. Hatch, the great energy unleashed by the Revolution came from evangelical upstarts like the Baptists and the Methodists; ministers who “clung to an undiluted Edwardsean theology, the authority of ordained clergymen, and the necessity of church discipline” were out of step with the emerging democratic ethos. Calvinism, in other words, was an intellectual shackle that kept its practitioners from embracing both the scientific advances of the age and the revolutionary opportunities afforded by the crisis with Great Britain.8
Adherents of Calvinism mounted a vigorous defense through the years, and this counteroffensive began with Calvin himself. While conceding that predestination could be seen as cruel and uncaring, he asserted that the doctrine was nevertheless indisputable because of God’s unlimited power and majesty. “No one can deny,” Calvin wrote, “that God foreknew the future final fate of man before He created him, and that He foreknew it because it was appointed by His own decree.” God was sovereign, Calvin reminded his followers, and man was utterly and completely dependent on him. The “elect” could look forward to salvation; the “reprobates” to eternal flames. Such an answer certainly did not quiet Calvin’s critics, and legions of theologians took up the task of defending Calvinism’s conception of God’s power. One of the most prolix was English writer William Prynne, who reiterated in 1629 “that God from eternity hath freely of his own accord, chosen out of mankinde a certaine select number of men, which can neither be augmented nor diminished; whom he doth effectually call, save, and bring to glory.”9
More ambitiously, others denied that Calvinism ignored good works and reform. One English sermon delivered in 1592 maintained “that whether a man be predestinate or no, yet he should live so much as may be in a holy obedience . . . for he that hath that hope that he is one of God’s sons doth purify himself, and being a vessel of honor must keep himself fair and clear for the use of his Master, being sanctified and prepared unto every good work.” A 1579 catechism that was included with the English version of the Geneva Bible provided an even clearer answer to the question of why, under predestination, anyone should do good: “Good work is a testimony of the spirit of God, which is given to the elect only.” In other words, performing good works was a way to show the world that you were not a reprobate, that you were, indeed, one of the chosen. This insight became a key tenet of faith for generations of Calvinists—from parliamentarians in 1620s England to Congregationalists in 1740s Massachusetts. Calvinism, they insisted, did not dampen moral behavior; it encouraged it.10
Defenders of Calvinism in the eighteenth century, however, had an even tougher task than did their sixteenth-century predecessors. The Enlightenment was a mature movement by the 1750s, and Richard Hooker’s assertion that reason and free will were gifts of God had gained a wide following. Calvinists of Jonathan Edwards’s generation had to reconcile reason and religion, free will and God’s omnipotence. One who took up this daunting challenge was English theologian Isaac Watts. “Man is an intellectual and sociable Being,” he asserted in a 1747 tract. “Human Reason is the first Ground and Spring to all human Religion. Man is obliged to Religion because he is a reasonable Creature. Reason directs and obliges us not only to search out and practice the Will of God, as far as natural Conscience will lead us, but also to examine, receive, and obey, all the Revelations which come from God.”11
Like Watts, the brilliant American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) did not deny the power of reason or the importance of science. True free will, he agreed, meant the ability to do what one chose to do. But while popular conceptions of free will were nebulous, even incoherent, Edwards carefully defined the term—people acted within the confines that God laid out for them. In other words, a wise and beneficent creator granted individuals a range of actions. That argument, in turn, rested on a deeper insight that undergirded Edwards’s defense of Calvinism. Critics like Henry VIII said predestination was a cruel doctrine; Edwards countered that God was not cruel—he was not capricious or petty or vindictive. He was loving and good and kind, a benevolent deity who wielded his immense power wisely. Edwards’s God was also clever. To explain the existence of evil and to account for the scientific advances of the age, Edwards posited that God governed the universe through multiple means: he established laws of nature for inanimate things—the laws that scientists were uncovering during the Enlightenment. But for humans, God governed with a somewhat looser hand, endowing his most important creation with reason and implanting within them free will and something called moral necessity: people were responsible for their actions. In his greatness, God allowed individuals the power to choose within the limits that God decreed. Thus, for Edwards, Calvinism did not undercut moral agency. It actually heightened it because of God’s loving greatness and human free will—God gave the elect good hearts, and these chosen ones wanted to do good for the glory of God. They wanted, in other words, to live godly lives, to improve themselves and society. That was their Christian mandate as God’s elect.12
Jacob Green was fascinated by this debate and followed it closely. In the early 1740s, as a farm boy soaking up the heady intellectual atmosphere of college life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he began questioning his faith as he struggled to understand all the ramifications of Calvinism. Raised in New England in a Congregationalist household, Green at first accepted Calvinism without questioning it. Then he was intellectually whipsawed by several events: the historic revivals of 1740–41 during the Great Awakening helped lead to his rebirth and a recommitment to Calvinism, before exposure to the Enlightenment during his classwork at Harvard College had him again questioning his predestinarian beliefs. As he readied to leave Cambridge in 1744 after graduating, Green confessed to a classmate that he was thoroughly confused about Calvinism and did not know how to reconcile all its paradoxes. Not surprisingly, Green was easily unmoored from his Calvinistic beliefs by ministers with “Arminian” leanings when he arrived in New Jersey in 1745. Still unsure what to think as he settled into the ministry, Green retreated to his study to explore the writings of Isaac Watts and Jonathan Edwards and to ponder the great questions that were so frustrating him.13
Green’s subsequent journey into the thicket of Calvinism and Arminianism (the doctrine asserting that salvation is open to all) was telling and fascinating, for it helps us to see how contemporaries grappled with the conundrum that King Henry raised back in the 1540s: how could Calvinism spur men and women to act morally, to do good for themselves and for society?
The answer to this question is the central concern of Jacob Green’s Revolution: Radical Religion and Reform in a Revolutionary Age, albeit with an American twist: how did Calvinism (and specifically an Edwardsean version of it) produce such a strong reform drive during the American Revolution? The book’s main subject is a reformer, theologian, and writer who was thrust into New Jersey revolutionary politics in spring 1776 when he published an influential tract called Observations on the Reconciliation of Great-Britain that urged wavering colonists to declare independence. The tract
