Abstract

Descending from the Puritan tradition, Evangelical Protestantism was the dominant cultural force in the nineteenth-century. Timothy Dwight played a significant role in the development of this movement. For twenty-two years as president and chaplain of Yale College, Dwight exerted a great influence on his contemporaries and, through his pupils, on succeeding generations. Dwight was a transitional figure between orthodox Puritanism and Evangelical Protestantism. ;Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards and child of New England, could trace his roots through five generations on American soil. However, Dwight was also influenced by the English Enlightenment whose commitment to rationalism, naturalism, and pragmatism shaped his theological system. Dwight accommodated the traditional Puritanism of Edwards to his enlightened times in a creative and effective way, but his Protestantism departed significantly from Edwardean Protestantism at several points, i.e., the distinction between reason and revelation, nature and grace, law and gospel. The resulting Protestantism was distinctly American--rational, moralistic, and voluntaristic. ;Dwight based his argument for the acceptance of Christianity on enlightened self-interest, according to its ability to provide happiness for the human race. Happiness was defined as peace of mind and social harmony. Using the theory of God's moral government Dwight convinced Americans that legislating God's moral order would produce the neat, quiet villages of New England. God's activity was limited to his provision of means by which people were to build the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God was incarnated in the New England town which in the nineteenth-century, spread throughout America. ;The effect of Dwight's theology was to secularize Christianity and to domesticate evil. Instead of making the ordinary holy, as he hoped to do, Dwight made the holy ordinary. God became a function of the good life. Dwight was also constrained by his rational presuppositions and Enlightenment optimism to limit evil to those acts of disobedience against God's moral order. He encouraged Americans to believe that they could contain evil by attendance to duty. This fostered a sense of American innocence that denied the possibility that evil might lurk within the very soul of a virtuous nation