By Ann Lee Bressler
During this quantity Ann Lee Bressler deals the 1st cultural historical past of yank Universalism and its valuable educating -- the concept an all-good and omnipotent God saves all souls. even supposing Universalists have ordinarily been lumped including Unitarians as "liberal religionists," in its origins their circulation used to be, in reality, particularly diverse from that of the better-known spiritual liberals.
Unlike Unitarians corresponding to the well known William Ellery Channing, who under pressure the duty of the person less than divine ethical sanctions, such a lot early American Universalists seemed to the all-powerful will of God to redeem all of production. whereas Channing used to be socially and intellectually descended from the rivals of Jonathan Edwards, Hosea Ballou, the major theologian of the Universalist circulation, appropriated Edwards's legacy via emphasizing the facility of God's love within the face of human sinfulness and obvious intransigence. Espousing what they observed as a fervent yet average piety, many early Universalists observed their flow as a kind of better Calvinism.
the tale of Universalism from the mid-nineteenth century on, even though, used to be principally one among unsuccessful efforts to keep up this early synthesis of Calvinist and Enlightenment beliefs. ultimately, Bressler argues, Universalists have been swept up within the tide of yank spiritual individualism and moralism; within the past due 19th century they more and more extolled ethical accountability and the cultivation of the self. by the point of the 1st Universalist centennial party in 1870, the beliefs of the early stream have been all yet moribund. Bressler's learn illuminates such matters because the courting among religion and cause in a tender, fast-growing, and deeply doubtful state, and the destiny of the Calvinist historical past in American non secular history.
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Extra resources for The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880 (Religion in America)
Sample text
Perry Miller observes that the seventeenth-century Puritans were “first and foremost the heirs of Augustine, but also . . ”138 Hence, Ballou and the early Universalists were hardly alone in their efforts to promote a viable synthesis of reason and religious belief. As we will see more fully in the next chapter, the flowering religious moralism of the decades around 1800 had its own arsenal of rational arguments. In America, the school of Scottish Common Sense, with its claim of the authority of conscience and its emphasis on the “moral sense,” led to the development of moral philosophy as a highly influential academic discipline parallel to theology.
In short, the movement directly contradicted the main tendency of the age. While often formally adhering to Calvinist doctrine, evangelicals increasingly emphasized individual initiative in the government of a morally just God. 27 Donald Meyer points out that moral philosophers stressed human freedom and responsibility in order to encourage humanity to pursue righteousness. 28 Samuel Stanhope Smith, Princeton’s president in the early decades of the nineteenth century, rejected Jonathan Edwards’s arguments against the freedom of the will.
Who, believing and realizing this, can be unkind? Who can be entirely engrossed in his own welfare? Who can be the oppressor of his brethren? Who can be deaf to the moan of the sufferer? 20 Whittemore reflected the long-standing conviction of Universalists that their belief was a uniquely powerful stimulus to the betterment of society. 22 The comparison is apt, even though Universalists saw new and somewhat different dangers threatening Christendom. With their single-minded and notably idealistic emphasis on one crucial teaching, Universalists spoke out against what they saw as a religiously inspired individualism.
