The members obviously liked what they saw, despite the shortcomings that Jacob so candidly described about himself. During these first years in Hanover, Green remained shy and unsure of himself, even in private settings. “I could speak but poorly in publick,” he lamented, “and I was bashful, backward and unapt to speak in private.” One step he took to overcome his nervousness and make himself “useful” to the membership “was to give out questions in writing, and have a time appointed to meet the people and hear them answer the questions as they thought proper, and then to make my own observations upon them.” The sessions could be quite freewheeling, and Green used them to become acquainted with his congregants on a personal level.6
Jacob’s insecurities ran deeper than his personality—they extended to his religious views, which were in flux in the 1740s and 1750s and were easily swayed by the luminaries he encountered in New England and New Jersey. George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and other apostles of the Great Awakening helped turn Jacob into what he termed in his autobiography a “zealous Calvinist” during his Harvard years (although this was an exaggeration). But despite his enthusiasm for John Calvin and the Reformed spirit, and despite his Puritan upbringing in Massachusetts, he departed Cambridge troubled about his Calvinistic faith and the paradoxes it presented. Across a broad front in the fields of science and religion, rationalists and advocates of the Enlightenment were questioning the theological system that had dominated western Europe for three centuries, and their attacks on predestination resonated with Jacob while he was a student at Harvard. As he confessed in the May 1744 letter to Nathaniel Tucker, he was unsure about predestination and free will and how one solved the many paradoxes they presented. Still, in 1744, his New England upbringing held firm, and he thought of himself as a Calvinist, believing that God controlled all and that “unregenerate men have now no power to embrace the offers of the Gospil.”7
Such certainty did not survive his first encounters with Dickinson and Burr in Elizabeth Town in 1745. The two Presbyterian leaders easily brought him around to their views on Presbyterianism and on a looser church membership. Abandoning Congregationalism for Presbyterianism was not a difficult step for Green; the two faiths arose out of the same Reformed tradition and had much in common, including a commitment to Calvinism and to a biblical-based church. The reversal on membership, however, was a dramatic repudiation of Jacob’s Puritan beliefs, which rested on the notion that only the elect could be full church members and participate in the sacraments. Dickinson and Burr, Green succinctly noted in his autobiography, “induced me to embrace Stoddard’s sentiments, which before I had thought were not right.” The reference was to the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, the influential Solomon Stoddard, who as pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, pressed for looser standards in an effort to win more converts to Christ. Jacob’s bow to Stoddardean standards induced him to take an even more heretical stance: he began to accept “some notions that were Arminian, or that bordered upon Arminianism; especially as to the power of the creature, the freedom of the will, the origin of action.”8
Despite these vicissitudes—or more accurately because of them—Green never stopped studying after he left Harvard. He read widely and thought deeply in the late 1740s and 1750s, as he worked out the views that allowed him to soften Calvinism’s hard edges and pursue a purer church and society in the 1760s and later; this study also undergirded his political views of the 1770s. His most intense period of study took place over seven months, from November 1754 to May 1755. Several times a week he retreated to his study to write in two daybooks. The first daybook covered more than 160 pages and was a wide-ranging exploration of divinity and what Jacob termed “the coda of systems.” In tightly packed pages that combined standard English with a system of shorthand developed by James Weston in the mid-eighteenth century, Jacob ranged over the centuries, beginning with the ancient philosophers (figs. 3 and 4). His central concerns were basic but profound: does God exist? Is the Bible accurate? What is free will? That Jacob even asked such questions was evidence of the turmoil he continued to experience in the mid-1750s. As a graduate of Harvard, he was well aware of developments in Western thought since the seventeenth century and the arrival of the Enlightenment in America in the eighteenth. Theologians everywhere were grappling with the challenges to Christianity posed by science, which was lifting the veil on nature’s workings and, ultimately, raising questions about God himself. The questions were serious enough that the Christian faithful believed they had to reassert the primacy of God, demonstrate the accuracy of the Bible, and explain the relevance of the Trinity. Many, like Samuel Clarke and John Witherspoon, fought fire with fire—they used science itself to make their case for religion. Reason was their watchword as they combated the skepticism of Arians, Socians, deists, philosophers, and others.9
Jacob Green, as a result, was hardly alone as he studied his Bible and pondered the meaning of faith. He approached the review of religion in an enlightened manner—his exploration was reasoned, rational, systematic, measured. The views of men, he warned in one early entry in his daybook, tended to run to extremes. He would avoid that pitfall and, instead, coolly examine the various controversies of the different ages. Jacob’s perambulations began with the customs of the ancients, including the Druids, and the hostility that early Christians faced. His review then carried him on to Jewish history, the “absurdities” of Roman Catholicism, and the views of everyone from Peter Lombard to the Socians. In his rough jottings—many sentences were half thoughts and lacked punctuation—Jacob did not advance his own arguments. Instead, his purpose was to poke and to prod at conventional wisdom as he worked his way up to the arguments of modern times. He was fascinated by the seemingly irreconcilable—those who relied on reason to determine God’s existence versus those who turned to revelation. As he studied Christian history, Jacob kept returning to his core questions, stressing the importance of learning which parts of the Bible represented truth and which were inspired by God. He devoted “chapters” in his daybook to analyzing God’s powers—the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and God the Son, among many others. In attempting to answer such questions, Jacob examined the origins of the world, the authority of the scriptures, and the nature of sin and evil.10
As he laboriously analyzed this coda, Jacob devoted one day a week (usually Wednesdays) to a second daybook, covering nearly one hundred pages, that broke down the mechanics of good writing and sermonizing. Here again he drew on his Harvard education and his experiences in the Great Awakening, focusing on Cicero and on how a “discourse . . . [can] move a heart.” Jacob wrote these daybook entries as if he was delivering a lecture to a classroom of college undergraduates: he would lay out his thesis and proceed to construct a carefully reasoned argument in support of that thesis. An important task for Jacob was determining in his mind what constituted bad writing. Such writing, he decided, “is weak and languid; i.e. what faintly conveys the authors sentiments.” Bad writers, he continued, “say nothing to inform the understanding, convince the Judgment, or please the Imagination . . . there is something awanting; which lies in this, that the discourse is not filled to make [an] Impression.” In other words, bad writers are boring—they are “pedantic”