href="#ulink_a216c29b-481b-5ce7-bc1b-7bcf3bba7d3f">21 This emphasis is what has traditionally signaled the supposed point of theological departure for Edwards’ successors. For, consequent to such a theological alterations (amongst others)—that Christ satisfied the legal demands of the moral law for everyone—it has been long believed that Bellamy (and those after him) ultimately rejected such fundamental Calvinistic ideas as the doctrine of limited atonement.22 Accordingly, Bellamy regarded these and other innovations in his moral governmental theology as the surest means to fortifying Calvinist thought in familial, ecclesial, and civic life throughout New England. Ironically, rather than warding off the liberalizing tendencies in New England’s theology at the time, Bellamy’s innovations, and in particular those developments he made to his doctrine of the atonement, have since been used to show New England theologies eventual undoing.23
While Bellamy was perhaps the most prodigious producer of second-generation Edwardsians, Hopkins and Edwards Jr certainly played their parts in carrying on the tradition.24 Hopkins—President Edwards’ first biographer and proud purveyor the now famous notion of “Disinterested Benevolence”25—like Bellamy, was for a time mentor to Edwards Jr. In fact, it is in all likelihood that Hopkins, whose eventual attempt at the systematization of Edwardsianism (and who had been entrusted by Sarah Edwards with the bulk of her husbands manuscripts), most effectively imbibed Edwards Jr with the catechetical model of instruction that he so effectively carried forward in his own ministerial mentorship.26 This is especially evident in his mentorship of Gelston. For, as we have already mentioned, during Gelston’s three-year period of instruction he was assigned not a portion, but all 313 theological questions that Edwards Jr had compiled. This is part of the reason for Gelston’s contemporary significance. Evidence suggests that he was the only one of Edwards Jr’s students to have labored in tackling all 313 questions with full and detailed answers, thus making his Systematic Collection particularly valuable, in comparison to other (mostly partial) lists of answers that other sources might provide. Interestingly, Gelston appears to have spent the bulk of these three years composing his answers in New York while serving as a sort of interim minister himself, rather than in Edwards Jr’s home, as was so often the custom for many parsonage seminaries of the time. Besides his being assigned the colossal task of answering all 313 questions, there are few details that are known about Gelston’s particular interaction with his mentor. Perhaps Dr. Edwards’ having registered to vote his former pupil into the Sherman church indicates the endurance of their relational interaction and closeness. That no extant personal correspondence—like that which Edwards Sr enjoyed from his friends Hopkins and Bellamy—between Gelston and Edwards Jr remains to seems to invalidate the idea of any perpetual closeness between the two. Toward the end of his life, however, Gelston intimated to Harrison his “high regard” for Dr. Edwards and his theology. Gelston also indicated to him, sounding much like President Edwards, that,
He read three human systems of theology and one divine; that after reading the former he was in doubt which to follow, when he determined to read the latter, which he did from beginning to end with pen in hand. After this, when a new question of doctrine arose, he went, not to [Samuel] Hopkins, Ridgeley, or [President] Edwards, to see what they said, but to the Word of God, to see how it compared with that.27
Such praise bespeaks not only a respect for the tradition that Gelston no doubt, self-consciously conscripted himself to under Edwards Jr. It also suggests the theological endurance of the early doctrinal summaries that make up his Systematic Collection. For this reason, despite the lack of further, more intimate, details about his life, Gelston’s significance for our better understanding the development of the New England theological tradition is beyond question. Let us now turn our attention to the developments surrounding the doctrine of atonement in early New England Theology.
II. New England Dogmatics? A Case Study of the Atonement
There are a variety of ways we might consider and weigh the significance of Gelston’s Systematic Collection. One particularly fruitful possibility is to treat Gelston’s work as a principal resource in the following case study. To this end, in what remains of this introduction, we present a brief case study of the doctrine of atonement and its development amongst the New England theologians. This will be less of an exercise in historical theology, and more of a systematic theological inquiry. That is, our interest in Gelston’s Systematic Collection has primarily to do with whether it might cast any new theological light on a recently rekindled discussion of the atonement in Edwards and his successors.
For those acquainted with New England religious historiography proximate to the theological legacy of Jonathan Edwards, the phrase “New England dogmatics” might sound like something of a contradiction. For, there may well be no other Protestant theological tradition that, having emerged from a single source, had so quickly and so erratically developed, and had yet come to such a sudden and still curious end. This is precisely what makes the ensuing proposal so interesting. For, there is more to the story that is significant to warrant contemporary attention than has traditionally been believed. In this way, we are not suggesting that Gelston’s Systematic Collection somehow provides justification for our re-visioning the development of New England theology as a whole. Our proposal is far more modest. With this editors’ introduction we want to join a growing number of scholars in etching away at the still fairly entrenched historical narrative of so-called “decline and fall”28 that still characterizes the trajectory of Edwards’ thinking amongst his successors—something that has traditionally had a great deal to do with the doctrine of atonement.29 In this way, the difference between our proposal here and the recent revisionist proposals about the doctrine of atonement in Edwards and his successors in contemporary literature amounts to simple difference in the angle from which we are looking, and Gelston’s Systematic Collection provides just such a vantage.
With all this in mind, the remainder of this introduction unfolds in three parts to a conclusion. Following a brief sketch of President Edwards on the penal substitutionary nature of the atonement—a way of demarcating the theological landscape, as it were, with which we are principally concerned—in the first part we lay out a sort of synthetic account of the so-called moral government model of atonement that has traditionally characterized Edwards’ successors. Then, in part two, we consider a recent account of Jonathan Edwards Jr’s moral government model offered up by Oliver Crisp. In the part three, we lay out evidence that suggests that Edwards Jr’s model of what Crisp calls “Penal Non-Substitution” is doctrinally “thicker” than Crisp suggests. We then pivot to a discussion of the dozen or so questions and answers about the atonement that Gelston’s Systematic Collection offers and consider how his answers to these questions bear upon our understanding of the atonement as it developed in New England around the time of the American Revolution. Here too, as with Edwards J., we will see evidence that some version of the doctrine of penal substitution, though diminished in part, remains a piece of the doctrinal furniture of this second generation Edwardsian. Let us turn now and briefly consider President Edwards on the atonement after which we layout our synthetic approach to the moral government model of atonement.
II.1. Atonement and the Moral Government of God
Until recently, and for more than a century, scholars have maintained that President Edwards’ musings about the atonement gave rise to a form of the moral government theory of the atonement that his successors embraced and developed, (roughly) according to which Christ dies in order to satisfy the rectoral rather than the retributive demands of God’s moral law.30 In this way, Christ performs the work of a penal
