Did she recognize, “in some measure at least, the deceitfulness of your heart, and that in punishment for your sins God might justly leave you to make yourself as miserable as you have made yourself sinful?” Would Harriet be happy with God alone should the rest of the universe be destroyed, he inquired. Rejoicing in your converted status? Young Harriet felt the boom lowered when a stalwart Edwardsean pastor probed her recent experience of the new birth. Trying to prepare your heart for the Lord? Arminian hubris. Observing the ordinary exercises of religion? Basking in false hope. As Stowe aptly reflected years later, it was a system “calculated, like a skillful engine of torture, to produce all the mental anguish of the most perfect sense of helplessness with the most torturing sense of responsibility.”įurthermore, any number of snares and delusions lay in wait along the way. That is, we must convert and can convert but won’t convert until God ordains it. Repent we can and must, Beecher taught, but only the elect will repent because we need God’s inducement to do so. Yet enough Calvinism remained to gum up the works. That is, salvation typically came by way of a personal experience of conversion in a concentrated episode of spiritual combat. This step was expected to take place in a season of unsparing self-assessment over against the unyielding standards of the Lord, at the end of which struggle one might feel “hopeful” or finally “convicted” of redemption. Human beings each and all were “children of wrath,” bound to eternal perdition unless they came to consciously repent of their sins and submit entirely to the rule of God. The first and last thing to be said about humanity was its obligation to comply with that regime-immediately, consistently, and wholeheartedly-and a person’s first question in life was to see if she did so obey. To fit the times Beecher’s theology did not start from Edwards’s glory of God but from the premise of human free agency under divine moral government. The First, he and his allies said, had been triggered by Edwards himself. He had been converted while a student at Yale by its president Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson, and he dedicated his life to projecting that experience on a national scale, leading the crusade dubbed the Second Great Awakening. Shooting this rapids was the task of men such as Harriet’s father, Lyman Beecher. His social vision, of people tied together in the bonds of organic relationships, gave way to a republic of independent individuals, free agents in a marketplace full of choices. Edwards’s idealist, sometimes mystical, vision was translated into an idiom of bare fact and remorseless logic. God was still an absolute sovereign but also a rationally accountable governor. The result was an Edwards trimmed to the cause of revivalism and transplanted from his framework of beauty to one of law and ethics. Edwards’s successors thought they were doing him a service by isolating what they took to be his main agenda and fitting it to an era, their era, bound by the demands of reason and the American Revolution. Seeing this disparity prompts us to ponder how legacies can be passed along and what might happen to them through the toils of time and chance. Indeed, she saw the opposite, a God who was distant, impossible to please, meager in grace, and willing to see multitudes suffer in the present age for some glory known only to him in a distant age to come. This Edwards is full of the light and divine love for which Stowe was starving. To be shepherded into his presence.” As 16-year-old Harriet put it in a letter to her pastor-brother: “I sometimes wish that the Saviour were visibly present in this world, that I might go to Him for a solution of some of my difficulties.”īut just such a Savior is on offer in the Jonathan Edwards that George Marsden captures in his new An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-First Century (IVP, 2023). To know the presence of our faithful God, in every situation. Laura de Jong spoke her longing in this space yesterday: “To feel at home in God. She yearned for beauty and affection in the world, for a God who was nearby. Further, Stowe’s spirit was not optimally designed for their message. Long story short, she thought his mind was awesome, and his influence awful.Īdmittedly, she received “her Edwards” via three generations of intermediaries who were highly selective in their choice of the master’s themes and applied them in a radically different context from his. She was also familiar first-hand with the theology of Jonathan Edwards and remains one of his most astute commentators today. If people recognize Harriet Beecher Stowe, it is as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the antislavery classic and the best-selling novel of the 19 th century.
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