More ambitiously, others denied that Calvinism ignored good works and reform. One English sermon delivered in 1592 maintained “that whether a man be predestinate or no, yet he should live so much as may be in a holy obedience . . . for he that hath that hope that he is one of God’s sons doth purify himself, and being a vessel of honor must keep himself fair and clear for the use of his Master, being sanctified and prepared unto every good work.” A 1579 catechism that was included with the English version of the Geneva Bible provided an even clearer answer to the question of why, under predestination, anyone should do good: “Good work is a testimony of the spirit of God, which is given to the elect only.” In other words, performing good works was a way to show the world that you were not a reprobate, that you were, indeed, one of the chosen. This insight became a key tenet of faith for generations of Calvinists—from parliamentarians in 1620s England to Congregationalists in 1740s Massachusetts. Calvinism, they insisted, did not dampen moral behavior; it encouraged it.10
Defenders of Calvinism in the eighteenth century, however, had an even tougher task than did their sixteenth-century predecessors. The Enlightenment was a mature movement by the 1750s, and Richard Hooker’s assertion that reason and free will were gifts of God had gained a wide following. Calvinists of Jonathan Edwards’s generation had to reconcile reason and religion, free will and God’s omnipotence. One who took up this daunting challenge was English theologian Isaac Watts. “Man is an intellectual and sociable Being,” he asserted in a 1747 tract. “Human Reason is the first Ground and Spring to all human Religion. Man is obliged to Religion because he is a reasonable Creature. Reason directs and obliges us not only to search out and practice the Will of God, as far as natural Conscience will lead us, but also to examine, receive, and obey, all the Revelations which come from God.”11
Like Watts, the brilliant American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) did not deny the power of reason or the importance of science. True free will, he agreed, meant the ability to do what one chose to do. But while popular conceptions of free will were nebulous, even incoherent, Edwards carefully defined the term—people acted within the confines that God laid out for them. In other words, a wise and beneficent creator granted individuals a range of actions. That argument, in turn, rested on a deeper insight that undergirded Edwards’s defense of Calvinism. Critics like Henry VIII said predestination was a cruel doctrine; Edwards countered that God was not cruel—he was not capricious or petty or vindictive. He was loving and good and kind, a benevolent deity who wielded his immense power wisely. Edwards’s God was also clever. To explain the existence of evil and to account for the scientific advances of the age, Edwards posited that God governed the universe through multiple means: he established laws of nature for inanimate things—the laws that scientists were uncovering during the Enlightenment. But for humans, God governed with a somewhat looser hand, endowing his most important creation with reason and implanting within them free will and something called moral necessity: people were responsible for their actions. In his greatness, God allowed individuals the power to choose within the limits that God decreed. Thus, for Edwards, Calvinism did not undercut moral agency. It actually heightened it because of God’s loving greatness and human free will—God gave the elect good hearts, and these chosen ones wanted to do good for the glory of God. They wanted, in other words, to live godly lives, to improve themselves and society. That was their Christian mandate as God’s elect.12
Jacob Green was fascinated by this debate and followed it closely. In the early 1740s, as a farm boy soaking up the heady intellectual atmosphere of college life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he began questioning his faith as he struggled to understand all the ramifications of Calvinism. Raised in New England in a Congregationalist household, Green at first accepted Calvinism without questioning it. Then he was intellectually whipsawed by several events: the historic revivals of 1740–41 during the Great Awakening helped lead to his rebirth and a recommitment to Calvinism, before exposure to the Enlightenment during his classwork at Harvard College had him again questioning his predestinarian beliefs. As he readied to leave Cambridge in 1744 after graduating, Green confessed to a classmate that he was thoroughly confused about Calvinism and did not know how to reconcile all its paradoxes. Not surprisingly, Green was easily unmoored from his Calvinistic beliefs by ministers with “Arminian” leanings when he arrived in New Jersey in 1745. Still unsure what to think as he settled into the ministry, Green retreated to his study to explore the writings of Isaac Watts and Jonathan Edwards and to ponder the great questions that were so frustrating him.13
Green’s subsequent journey into the thicket of Calvinism and Arminianism (the doctrine asserting that salvation is open to all) was telling and fascinating, for it helps us to see how contemporaries grappled with the conundrum that King Henry raised back in the 1540s: how could Calvinism spur men and women to act morally, to do good for themselves and for society?
The answer to this question is the central concern of Jacob Green’s Revolution: Radical Religion and Reform in a Revolutionary Age, albeit with an American twist: how did Calvinism (and specifically an Edwardsean version of it) produce such a strong reform drive during the American Revolution? The book’s main subject is a reformer, theologian, and writer who was thrust into New Jersey revolutionary politics in spring 1776 when he published an influential tract called Observations on the Reconciliation of Great-Britain that urged wavering colonists to declare independence. The tract was so well received in the middle colonies that it led to Green’s election to the Provincial Congress that cast New Jersey’s lot with the rebelling colonists; it also led to his selection as the chairman of the committee that wrote New Jersey’s first constitution as an independent state.14
Green was born in Malden, Massachusetts, near Boston, in 1722, the son of a struggling farmer who died a year after Jacob’s birth. His mother and uncles who raised Green tried to teach him a trade or to steer him to farming, but this serious youth with a love of books had other ideas. Despite limited financial resources, Green managed to enroll in Harvard, where his great intellectual journey began and where he was exposed to not only books of the Enlightenment but also the evangelical world of George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. About a year after graduation, when a job offer from Whitefield fell through, Green found himself in New Jersey, where he became a minister for the Presbyterian congregation in Hanover, a farming community about twenty-six miles west of New York City. Despite his feelings of inadequacy, Green’s talents and energies quickly began to emerge, as he aggressively led the Presbyterian congregation and worked as a farmer, miller, teacher, and physician. His intellectual prowess, as well as his connections in New Jersey Presbyterianism, secured him a seat on the College of New Jersey’s board of trustees, and he served briefly as college president after the death of his mentor, Jonathan Edwards.15
From a variety of sources, including a thorough examination of biblical history and Edwards’s Freedom of the Will, Green in the 1750s developed his ideas on Calvinism, free will, reason, and the church that, when mixed in with his Lockean understanding of politics and the cauldron that was the American Revolution, undergirded his ambitious reform efforts. For Green, the central concern in his sermons and various writings was, why act morally? Why should anyone—saved or unsaved—perform good works? In painstaking detail over four decades, Green laid out his answers.
The key issue for him—one that was fraught with political implications for the governing of society—was the need to create stronger and purer churches. While some reformers trying to smooth out Calvinism’s rough edges were arguing that the church should become more inclusive