Also known as the New Theology, Consistent Calvinism, and Hopkinsianism, the New Divinity was a religious movement that greatly influenced North American Calvinism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Initiated by Jonathan Edwards and developed by his successors, it had emerged by the 1760s as a distinctive position in opposition to both the Liberals and the Old Calvinist theologians of the day. Although it was always a loose movement that included a wide range of beliefs, its thinkers were united in emphasizing the governmental power of God and insisting on the personal responsibility of each individual for their sins. Despite introducing theological innovations, such as a rejection of some aspects of Covenantal theology, the movement’s beliefs and interests remained within the Calvinist tradition in New England.
Edwards developed his ideas, as did his immediate theological successors Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, during a period of rapid change in American Calvinist thought. The religious turmoil occasioned by the Great Awakening combined with the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes to challenge previous conceptions of free will and predestination. Calvinist thinkers were forced to either defend or alter their views, and a wide range of beliefs emerged, usually grouped into three loose parties: the Liberals, who began to move away from Calvinism; the Old Calvinists, who defended traditional Congregational beliefs; and the New Divinity movement, which attempted to articulate a consistent Calvinism by creating a systematic theology that they could defend unapologetically. Edwards and his students based their ideas on a strong sense of God’s sovereign power and each individual’s responsibility for their own sins, which they used to defend a Calvinistic interpretation of the crucial issues of the time: free will, atonement, and original sin.
Edwards responded to Enlightenment concerns about the nature of free will by arguing that although physical causes might create involuntary physical effects, moral causes could do no more than strongly incline an individual to sin. All moral actions remained ultimately voluntary, and all men were capable of choosing redemption at any moment; each individual was therefore fully responsible for his unregenerate state and could justly be punished for it. This emphasis on free will paradoxically accompanied a strong belief in predestination: Edwards and his followers argued that the moral nature of mankind was so overwhelmingly inclined to sin that although redemption was always possible, in reality it could not be achieved except through grace, when God turned the heart’s inclination toward holiness. This combination of personal responsibility for sin and an emphasis on God’s power also determined the New Divinity responses to original sin and atonement. Rejecting the Old Calvinist doctrine that claimed that mankind was represented in Adam and so inherited his sin, the New Divinity theologians insisted that only Adam was responsible for his own actions, but that as a result of the Fall, God had made mankind naturally inclined to sin. Similarly, the New Divinity thinkers rejected both the Universalist belief that Christ’s sacrifice had redeemed all mankind and the Old Calvinist view that he died only for the elect, by claiming that Christ had chosen to suffer the punishment for mankind’s crime. However, this sacrifice did not remove individual guilt; only the regenerate who received grace were able to take advantage of Christ’s atonement.
The New Divinity movement became steadily more influential and widespread after the death of Edwards, originally through the work of Bellamy, who wrote the enduringly popular True Religion Delineated (1750), and Hopkins, whose System of Doctrines (1750) was so influential, the New Divinity movement became known as Hop-kinsianism. The establishment of seminaries at Andover, Hartford, and Yale led to the training of several generations of New Divinity theologians, who continued the development of Edwards’s ideas. The New Divinity continued as a popular and increasingly loose movement into the 19th century: Later thinkers who came under its influence included Jonathan Edwards, Jr., Timothy Dwight, Leonard Woods, Nathaniel W. Taylor, Bennet Tyler, Nathaniel Emmons, and Edwards A. Park.
Further reading: William Breitenbach, “The Consistent Calvinism of the New Divinity Movement,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 41 (April 1984): 241-264; Mark
Valeri, Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy's New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
—Alison Stanley
World History
