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.Indeed, as Norman Fiering has argued, the latitudinarian sermon “was the primary medium by which New England was eased into the enlightenment.” 29The Enlightenment’s aversion to uncompromising orthodoxies shonethrough in the latitudinarian attitude toward predestination.The most notable statement on the subject was Bishop Burnet’s Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles (1699), which attempted to demonstrate that Anglicanism’s founding confession permitted latitude on controversial doctrinal matters.Of all the disputed questions in divinity, Burnet explained, predestination Enlightenment Doubts and Evangelical Division81was “one of the longest, the subtilest, and indeed the most intricate.” In the Church of England, Calvinists and Arminians had long contended with each other over this issue, and each position had both advantages and disadvantages.Burnet believed that Calvinism’s advantage was its tendency to ascribe all honor to God, which usually promoted a salutary humility among the faithful; its disadvantage was its adherents’ occasional temptation to “false Security and Sloth” about their own election.Arminianism’s advantage was its sense of personal responsibility for sin, which tended to promote virtuous action; its disadvantage was its adherents’ occasional pro-pensity for trusting their own abilities too much and God’s too little.The common fault of both Calvinists and Arminians was to “charge one another with the Consequences of their Opinions, as if they were truly their Tenets.”The division between the two parties admitted of no fi nal resolution, Burnet argued.Indeed, he added, the same irreconcilable difference existed among Catholics in the division between the disciples of Augustine and the disciples of Molina.The “Knot of the whole Diffi culty” was whether God elected persons with or without foresight of their conduct.Fortunately, claimed Burnet, article 17 of the Thirty-nine Articles allowed both sides to maintain their opinions.Though it was “very probable” that the framers of the confession accepted the Calvinist doctrine that predestination was absolute and not linked to foreseen merit, they did not say so explicitly in article 17, which simply stated that before the foundation of the world, God “decreed by his Counsel, secret to us” to choose certain persons for salvation.Thus, Arminians could also subscribe to the document without renouncing theircommitment to conditional predestination.30Though Burnet refrained from taking sides in his explication of article 17, he could not resist noting in the book’s preface his own preference for“the Doctrine of the Greek Church”—a reference to John Chrysostom and others who, like the later Arminians, tied predestination to foreknowledge.Augustine, Burnet insisted, had departed from this doctrine and formed a new system.Yet despite his own disagreement with Augustinianism, Burnet appealed to his Calvinist readers to examine his Exposition to see if he had not represented their opinions both with “Truth and Candor” and with “all possible Advantages.” “There is no part of this whole Work, in which I have labour’d with more Care, and have writ in a more uncommon Method, than concerning Predestination.” 31Burnet’s ambitions as a great conciliator were only partially realized.His fellow latitudinarians loved the Exposition, and in America the book was still being used a century later by presiding Episcopal bishop William White in instructing candidates for the ministry.32 But in his own day, Burnet’s commentary enraged partisans on both sides of the Calvinist-Arminian 82Predestinationdivide.The high-church Arminians, who then dominated the lower house of the Church of England’s governing body, the Convocation of Canterbury, attempted unsuccessfully to push through a formal censure of the book in 1701.33 In America the following year, Cotton Mather undoubtedly had Burnet in mind when, in an address to fellow ministers defending Calvinist predestinarianism, he complained of the “Late Attempts to make the Articles.of the Church of England consistent with the most palpable contradictions hereunto.” It was “high time,” Mather declared, for Christians to stand up for the Calvinist doctrines of grace and to beware of the fashionable books “scattered every where” that were traffi cking in alterna-tive theologies.34Yet in seeking to neutralize the acids of old dogmatic controversies, the latitudinarians did not stop with the doctrines of grace.The doctrine of eternal torment in hell had always lent predestination its urgency.Hell raised predestination from a purely academic question to a matter that inspired palpable fear in the faithful, jolting them from complacency and goading them to make their “calling and election sure” (2 Pet.1:10).Even the latitudinarian divines recognized hell’s utility—Tillotson called it “the great-est Discouragement to Sin”35—but they also found the extremes of hellfi re preaching to be distasteful.More fundamentally, the latitudinarians, along with a growing chorus of less orthodox thinkers, expressed doubts about the reasonability of the idea that hell torment would last forever.Tillotson, even while urging his listeners to meditate often on hell, “sabotaged [the doctrine] by indirection” (as Norman Fiering has put it) in equivocating on hell punishment’s duration.36 Tillotson admitted that the Bible spoke in various places of everlasting punishment, as at the end of Jesus’ eschatological discourse (Matt.25:46), but he insisted that God was under no obligation to make good on his threats.A threat, Tillotson explained, was different from a promise.If God chose not to follow through on his threat of eternal punishment, he would be “not worse but better than his word,” which would give sinners no cause for complaint.A promise, however, made God a “debtor”to humanity.If he failed to keep his promise of salvation to all who believed, he would be denying the faithful something they were owed.37 Tillotson also suspected that there was more “subtlety than.solidity” in the traditional argument that sin deserves infi nite punishment because its ultimate object is the infi nite God.If all sins deserve an infi nite penalty, Tillotson maintained, then all sins would in effect be equal, which is patently absurd in light of Jesus’ own implied assertions that there would be different degrees of punishment in the afterlife (Matt.11:22; Luke 12:47–48).38 Surely, Tillotson reasoned, God infl icted a “cooler Hell” on persons who had committed less heinous sins.And whatever the degree of punishment, surely God ordained Enlightenment Doubts and Evangelical Division83no future retribution arbitrarily and preemptively, without foresight of a person’s transgressions.39Tillotson’s effort to downsize hell by reducing the sentences of its occu-pants did not sit well with Calvinists in New England.When Jesus alluded to degrees of punishment, declared Jonathan Edwards from his Massachusetts pulpit, he was not referring to varying durations [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]