Jonathan Edwards and Charles Chauncy and enthusiasm described and treatise on the religious affections

One of the results of the revival was not only schisms in established churches but the "awakening" of genuine and organized opposition to the revival in Massachusetts. The mantle of opposition fell on the Rev. Charles Chauncy of Boston's First Church, a Harvard-educated anti-revivaler who burst on the scene through his cautionary 1742 tract "Enthusiasm Defined and Cautioned Against," which he had first delivered the week after the Harvard Commencement in that same year (Marsden, 272). Chauncy pulled no punches. "Enthusiasm 'tis properly a disease, a sort of madness," that was not only not encouraged by the New Testament but was expressly prohibited by it.

2. PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGES

Of significance, however, for the ongoing debate over the fruit of the revival was Chauncy's and Edwards' thoughts about how the mind and the heart were related when the Spirit of God worked on them. Chauncy, educated in classical terminology and images, argued that humans had a tripartite psyche and that the mind always had to be in control. "The plain truth is an enlightened mind, and not raised affections, ought always to be the guide of those who call themselves men; and this, in affairs of religion, as well as other things" (Marsden, 281).

Plato had argued, for example, in Book IV of the Republic that the mind, allied with the spirited part of the human, needed to rule the appetitive part so that the whole person would be like a harmoniously tuned instrument. In contrast, Edwards developed a different understanding of the human soul, fueled by his acquaintance with revival, but one which was not clearly articulated either by him in his Treatise on the Religious Affections (1746) nor by Marsden. What Edwards was trying to do was to situate the essence of human experience in what he called the affections. The affections, however, were not to be acquainted with the passions of Chauncy or the appetites of Plato. Rather, the affections were some kind of combination of the will and the heart, a kind of super-charged feeling that would be linked to and united with the mind to form a unitary person and psyche. His famous statement near the beginning of the Religious Affections, that "true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections," captures this new psychological reality he was trying to communicate.

I think, actually, that Edwards was onto something as he tried to come up with a more unitary explanation of the human psyche. Chauncy's psychology had tradition to support it, but it really was quite foreign to those who believed that the essence of true piety related to the awakened heart. And, though sometimes, when we take the time to think about it, we might liken an inner struggle to the mind trying to control unruly emotions, more likely we approach reality as a being who wants to understand and life live from the heart. Thus, Edwards was searching for something that might question the dominant tripartite psychology of the time, even if he didn't quite find the best way to explain it.

3. THEOLOGICAL CHANGES

One other thing that was in the air was a different conception of theology than that taught in the Saybrook Platform of 1708, assumed at Yale College in the 1720s and expressed particularly in the Westminster Confession of Faith from the 1640s. In short, Arminianism was creeping into the strongholds of Puritan New England. Arminianism emphasized human ability in responding to the message of grace. Part of Edwards' appeal and Whitefield's allure was that they preached a Gospel to which the hearer's couldn't properly respond. In other words, their message was predicated on the fact that unless God first awakened the heart, the hearers would be unable to respond to the gracious message of salvation and would plunge unceremoniously into the yawning and inky abyss of hell. Arminianism betokened a new era in theological thought. It was, in many ways, a doctrine more attuned to the new commercial realities of the 1740s and 1750s than was Purtian Calvinism. It was attuned also to the popular political movements of the 1760s and 1770s, which all believed that it was in human power to initiate a revolution, to stand up for enslaved people, to redress wrongs that had for long years been foisted on the colonists. In short, the Calvinistic forms of the 17th and early 18th centuries were breaking down in the wake of the revival. Though some of that Calvinism would stand behind the 2nd Great Awakening in the early 19th century, Calvinism as a theological system would never again have a wide following in the American landscape, even though its ethical system and work-ethic still stalks the halls of even the most secular university in 2005.

Conclusion

One would have wished that Marsden was more skillful in laying out some of the secular realities in which these theological debates were taking place. How did the assumptions of people change between 1730 and 1745? What was "in the air" in the time? What were some shaping experiences of those not affected by revival? What new economic and political realities were on the scene? Were any new intellectual winds blowing into New England from the Continent? Attention to these questions would have given more substance to Marsden's treatment of this period. Nevertheless, the fact that he stimulates so many questions means that his work is fundamentally very, very successful.

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