New England Dogmatics
A Systematic Collection of Questions and Answers in Divinity by
Maltby Gelston (1766–1865)
edited by
Robert L. Boss
Joshua R. Farris
S. Mark Hamilton
foreword by
Kenneth P. Minkema
To
Ken Minkema
Robert Caldwell
&
Gloria Thorne
Foreword
Within congregational circles during the colonial and early republican periods in North America, a trained and qualified ministry was considered essential for the perpetuation of thriving churches and of a godly society. Thus, seminaries for the training of pastors were established—Harvard in Massachusetts Bay, Yale in Connecticut. After the Revolution, more such seminaries multiplied. These nurseries of learning and piety were hallmarks of the society.
But there were other, less institutional settings for ministerial formation, perhaps the most important being the “parsonage seminaries” or “schools of the prophets” set up by local pastors. It was common practice for a student, having finished his baccalaureate work, to supplement or extend his training and experience, either before going on for a master’s degree, or while pursuing it. This period was called “rusticating.” The student would identify an established pastor who ran a school of the prophets with whom he wanted to live for a time—usually a year or so—during which he would be part of the minister’s family, try his hand at preaching, visitation, and other pastoral duties, and witness the domestic, social, and professional life of an ordained leader in all its aspects. He would also, under his mentor’s direction, engage in further study.
Jonathan Edwards, the famous theologian and revivalist, was one of the figures of the colonial era who rusticated seminarians-in-training, as was Jonathan Jr, the only son of the senior Edwards to become a minister, during the post-Revolutionary period. Edwards Jr did not accept as many students as did his own mentors and former students of his father, Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, but many of the ones he did accept went on to illustrious careers. Consider, for example, his nephew Timothy Dwight, who became president of Yale College and member of the literary circle known as the Connecticut Wits; Samuel Austin, pastor of the influential Fair Haven church in New Haven; Jedidiah Morse, geographer and founding member of Andover Seminary; Edward Dorr Griffin, pastor of the prestigious Park Street Church in Boston and faculty member at Andover; and Samuel Nott, pastor of Franklin, Connecticut, for an impressive tenure of seventy-two years (that has to be some kind of record), successor to Edwards Jr. as the president of the Connecticut Missionary Society, and himself the mentor of several hundred ministerial candidates.
In the manner of his father, Edwards Jr crafted a list of questions in divinity for his students to answer. Still another of Edwards Jr’s students was Maltby Gelston—hardly a household name, at least up until now. Gelston has left us his notebook containing his responses to all 313 questions posed to him by his mentor. Here we have a wonderful index of the nature of theological education in late eighteenth-century New England; of the evolution and points of controversy within Reformed theology generally; and of the continuities and changes occurring within Edwardseanism specifically. Hopefully, other such notebooks, whether by students or teachers, will emerge to help fill out some of the issues raised by Gelston’s personal version of a systematic theology. But Gelston’s notebook in and by itself is a valuable and informative source whose availability we can welcome and whose content we can plumb.
Kenneth P. Minkema
Jonathan Edwards Center
Yale University
Preface
Preparation of the Text
The text of Maltby Gelston is reproduced in this edition as he wrote it in manuscript form. That it may be presented in manner faithful to the original and in a way sensible to modern readers, a number of minor, technical alterations have been made:
1. Spelling is standardized to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. This means little more than excising unnecessary vowels from certain words like the “u” from “colour” or normalizing words like “indifferency” to “indifference” or “compleat” to “complete.”
2. Punctuation in Gelston’s manuscript is erratic and often inconsistent, particularly with respect to the use (or overuse) of commas—something quite common to this historical period. Such overuse is regularized. In addition, the editors have taken care to maintain all of Gelston’s sentence structures and paragraph divisions.
3. Gelston’s citation of Scripture requires minimal standardization. This means little more than completing abbreviations to biblical book references.
4. Minor typographical errors or obscure markings on the page, of which there are few, are also corrected without annotation. Those sentences and paragraphs that are crossed out in Gelston’s manuscript are provided in the citations where they clearly contribute to the development of the author’s thought(s).
5. Gelston references a number of secondary sources without citation. Insofar as they can be traced, they are cited in the footnotes.
6. Gelston’s manuscript contains a substantial supplement to the main text containing extended answers to certain questions he thought required further explanation. For the sake of the reader all supplemental material is cited in the footnotes.
7. Finally, all questions have been keyed to the corresponding page numbers in the original manuscript and appear in brackets as follows: Question 1. [2].
Acknowledgements
We owe a monumental debt of gratitude to a number of friends and colleagues who helped us produce this work: Robert Caldwell, Oliver Crisp, David Kling, and Doug Sweeney. We are particularly grateful to Ken Minkema of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, who gave of his time and unmatched expertise to help shape this project and who also kindly agreed to author the preface for this work. Special thanks also to Gloria Thorne of the Sherman Historical Society who secured a considerable number of important manuscript resources for us and whose enthusiasm for the project carried us through in the final stages of editing. Finally, we would like to thank the staff at Yale University’s Sterling and Beinecke Library’s for their kind assistance in procuring Gelston’s manuscript with great punctuality, precision, and care. Our families were an immeasurable source of support throughout this project. To them we owe far more thanks than could possibly be expressed here. Many thanks to the editor’s of the following journals for generously permitting select portions of the following articles to be republished here:
S. Mark Hamilton and Joshua R Farris, “The Logic of Reparation: Contemporary Restitution Models of Atonement, Divine Justice, and Somatic Death.” Irish Theological Quarterly [online first: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0021140017742804] 83.1 (Feb 2018).
S. Mark Hamilton, “Jonathan Edwards, Anselmic Satisfaction, and God’s Moral Government.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 17.1 (2015) 1–22.
S. Mark Hamilton, “Jonathan Edwards on the Atonement.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15.4 (2013) 394–415.
SMH, JRF, & RLB
January 2019
Soli Deo Gloria
New England Dogmatics
A Systematic Collection of Questions and Answers in Divinity by Maltby Gelston (1766–1865)
Copyright © 2019 Robert L. Boss, Joshua R. Farris, and S. Mark Hamilton. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications