| 书目名称 | Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment | | 副标题 | Scripture and Experi | | 编辑 | Ryan P. Hoselton | | 视频video | | | 概述 | Builds upon and bridges growing scholarship on Mather’s and Edwards’ exegesis by bringing them together in one study.Focuses particularly on their pursuit of experimental knowledge and piety.Contextua | | 丛书名称 | Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World | | 图书封面 |  | | 描述 | .This book explores the early evangelical quest for enlightenment by the Spirit and the Word. While the pursuit originated in the Protestant Reformation, it assumed new forms in the long eighteenth-century context of the early Enlightenment and transatlantic awakened Protestant reform. This work illuminates these transformations by focusing on the dynamic intersection of experimental philosophy and experimental religion in the biblical practices of early America’s most influential Protestant theologians, Cotton Mather (1663-1728) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). As the first book-length project to treat Mather and Edwards together, this study makes an important contribution to the extensive scholarship on these figures, opening new perspectives on the continuities and complexities of colonial New England religion. It also provides new insights and interpretive interventions concerning the history of the Bible, early modern intellectual history, and evangelicalism’s complex relationship to the Enlightenment. . | | 出版日期 | Book 2023 | | 关键词 | evangelicalism; Protestant Reformation; spiritual enlightenment; early America; long eighteenth-century | | 版次 | 1 | | doi | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44935-2 | | isbn_softcover | 978-3-031-44937-6 | | isbn_ebook | 978-3-031-44935-2Series ISSN 2634-5838 Series E-ISSN 2634-5846 | | issn_series | 2634-5838 | | copyright | The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerl |
| 1 |
Front Matter |
|
|
Abstract
|
| 2 |
,Introduction: Spiritually Discerned, |
Ryan P. Hoselton |
|
Abstract
This book explores the early evangelical quest for spiritual enlightenment by the Spirit and the Word. The pursuit originated in the Protestant Reformation, but it assumed new forms in the long eighteenth-century context of the early Enlightenment and transatlantic awakened Protestant reform movements. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers rejected Roman Catholicism’s notions of authority as arbitrary, and they dismissed its rituals as idolatrous fabrications of sinful human nature with no inherent spiritual basis. They contended that religious authority must derive from the divinely inspired, infallible, and self-authenticating Holy Scriptures. To attain true spiritual knowledge, the Spirit must enlighten the soul by the Word and enable one to experience Scripture’s divine truths personally.
|
| 3 |
,“Search the Scriptures; Search Your Experiences”: Reading the Bible Spiritually from the Reformatio |
Ryan P. Hoselton |
|
Abstract
“How shall we prove the Spirit?” asked an exasperated Martin Luther (1483–1546) amid his battles with Rome, enthusiasts, and Erasmus over the proper interpretation of Scripture. The question would absorb Protestants for generations to come. Seeking a form of knowledge that offered not only certainty but also intimacy with God, they laid increasing weight on the authority of spiritual experience to discern the voice, light, and affections of the Spirit in the Word. While interest in this dynamic interaction among the Spirit, Scripture, and experience long preceded the Reformation—as seen in the writings of early church fathers, Christian mystic traditions, and the . movement—it became especially integral to early Protestant efforts to reconstruct the foundations of faith and religious authority independent of the magisterium. Eighteenth-century awakened Protestants, such as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, would carry the quest for experiential religion by the Word and Spirit in new times as they labored to revive Protestant Christendom in true and vital religion.
|
| 4 |
,“Experimental Christians”: Mather’s Philosophical and Biblical Vitalism, |
Ryan P. Hoselton |
|
Abstract
Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was the most copious and learned biblical exegete in colonial New England. Like his Puritan forefathers, he labored to bring biblical scholarship in service of experimental religion. He read the Word with the theological lens of his Reformed Protestant tradition, which was above all Trinitarian, covenantalist, Christocentric, and practical-oriented. At the same time, he frequently wandered outside his camp for inspiration from diverse sources: including Protestant exegetes of various theological and denominational backgrounds, early church fathers, rabbinical scholars, mystics, Catholics, occult writers, and poets. Though he never once crossed the ocean, he was deeply immersed in the intellectual and religious currents of the wider North Atlantic world and did all an American colonial could to engage the latest European fashions in philosophy, science, biblical scholarship, and religious reform. He found the times he lived in invigorating, but also precarious. He deemed the fruits of the new learning auspicious providences for the advancement of Christian knowledge and God’s kingdom, but he worried that they would be squandered in the vain pursuits of man.
|
| 5 |
,“Evangelical Illustrations”: Mather’s Experimental Exegesis, |
Ryan P. Hoselton |
|
Abstract
According to his son Samuel, Cotton Mather read at least fifteen chapters of Scripture a day since his youth. His interest in biblical scholarship also began early. He learned Greek and Hebrew as a boy, and for his master’s thesis at Harvard he tackled the debates over the origins and divine inspiration of the Hebrew vowel points in the Old Testament. As a pastor, he devoted considerable energy to exegetical studies for sermon preparation while continuing to immerse himself in the latest biblical scholarship. In 1693, he resolved to employ the fruit of his studies for a new commentary on the Scriptures titled “Biblia Americana,” a resolution he kept until the final months of his life. As recent studies have shown, Mather’s “Biblia” provides a window into some of the most significant intellectual currents of his time. Wishing to uphold his Reformed Protestant tradition’s affirmation of the Bible’s infallibility and authority, Mather responded to new challenges raised against the historicity, authorship, provenance, geographical accuracy, and philology of the Bible as well as questions about traditional conceptions of prophecy and typology—especially as it related to Christological i
|
| 6 |
,“Complex Spiritual Ideas”: Edwards, the Spiritual Sense, and Scripture, |
Ryan P. Hoselton |
|
Abstract
Like Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards’ biblical practices and religious experientialism formed amid momentous transformations in philosophy, biblical scholarship, and piety that magnified the experiential and epistemological opposition of nature and spirit. Edwards’ extensive and multifaceted engagement with the Bible has only recently received significant scholarly attention, giving rise to new insights and questions regarding his thought and his times. While he embraced the Reformed Protestant commitment to Scripture’s perspicuity, self-attesting authority, self-interpreting nature, the analogy of faith, and a historical-redemptive framework, he joined Mather in being among the first in British North America to engage seriously in the early developments of critical biblical scholarship. According to Robert Brown, Edwards’ use of historical-critical thinking in service of a more evidentialist-oriented apologetic conflicted with his tradition’s affirmation of Scripture’s self-authenticating authority. At the same time, Stephen Stein and Stephen Nichols, among others, have argued that Edwards’ innovative notion of the regenerate soul’s spiritual sense produced a subjective and arbitr
|
| 7 |
,“It Wonderfully Enlightens”: Edwards’ Exegesis of Sensation, |
Ryan P. Hoselton |
|
Abstract
Edwards’ sermons and published writings display the colossal extent of his practical efforts to know and expound the Word to further spiritual enlightenment for himself and others. He also devoted several unpublished notebooks to this end. He began the notebook entitled “Notes on Scripture” in early 1724 during his brief pastorate in Bolton, Connecticut, and he maintained it until shortly before his death. He filled it with 507 entries, following no organizational system other than the devotional, ministerial, and intellectual interests that engaged him in a given season of life. In 1730 he began exegetical entries in another notebook, “Miscellaneous Observations on the Holy Scriptures,” which he received as a gift from his brother-in-law Benjamin Pierpont. He referred to it as the “Blank Bible” because it was a Bible interleaved with blank pages, and he penned over 5500 exegetical notes in it. Other unpublished exegetical notebooks or leaflets include his “Notes on the Apocalypse,” “Images of Divine Things,” “Types of the Messiah,” “Hebrew Idioms,” “Defense of the Authenticity of the Pentateuch as a Work of Moses and the Historicity of the Old Testament Narratives,” “Notes on Book
|
| 8 |
,Conclusion, |
Ryan P. Hoselton |
|
Abstract
Cotton Mather’s head was filled with questions that the Bible did not answer plainly. He turned to experimental philosophy and experimental religion for insight. On the last question in his commentary on Luke’s gospel, he had reached his limits: Where was heaven? Where was Christ’s ascended and glorified body? He first contemplated a hypothesis from the Newtonian natural philosopher William Whiston, since after all it contained less “. in it, than in some of his Assertions.” It seemed improbable that heaven’s location was beyond the stars—for if the mathematicians’ calculations were correct, it would constitute “an unaccountable Violence” to “the Very Nature of Body…and uniform Lawes of .” to travel that distance so quickly. A more likely location was just outside the world’s atmosphere, which the baroscope had estimated to be about “Fifty Miles” away. It also makes sense of Jesus’ frequent comings and goings during the forty days after his resurrection, and of Scripture passages that speak of heavenly beings observing earthly affairs and intervening in them in real time (Job 1, 1 Kgs 22, Luke 16, 2 Cor 12:2). Yet Mather was not quite ready to concede Whiston’s hypothesis. After al
|
| 9 |
Back Matter |
|
|
Abstract
|
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment影响因子(影响力)
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment影响因子(影响力)学科排名
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment网络公开度
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment网络公开度学科排名
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment被引频次
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment被引频次学科排名
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment年度引用
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment年度引用学科排名
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment读者反馈
书目名称Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment读者反馈学科排名
|
|
|
发表于 2025-3-21 18:26:23
