Beyond these few historical facts and the testimony to the effectual ministration of his church duties, there is little extent biographical material about Gelston and even less about his time under the instruction of Edwards Jr. This is somewhat problematic at one level. For, we want to be careful not to read Gelston’s Systematic Collection too far afield from the historical context wherein it was composed. With that in mind, and as there is so scant a record of Gelston’s life at the time, his particular place in and value to the New England theological tradition has (for our purposes) a great deal more to do with the particular answers that his Systematic Collection supplies us with than it does with the circumstances of its composition. For this reason, let us briefly and more broadly consider the occasion of his composition, after which we will turn our attention to the significance of its content, paying particular attention to what it says about the nature of the atonement.
The occasion for which Gelston’s wrote his Systematic Collection appears to be in keeping with those activities common to the early New England ministerial tradition, sometimes referred to as the “parsonage seminary.” It was commonplace for college educated ministerial candidates, like Gelston, to receive the bulk of their practical instruction from an established local minister. In the case of Gelston, such instruction came from his time with the younger Edwards—a coveted arrangement to be sure. For, after President Edwards’ death in 1758, scores of ministerial candidates (again, principally from Yale College), including John Smalley (1734–1820), Jonathan Edwards Jr (1745–1801), Aaron Burr Jr (1756–1836), looked to Edwards Sr’s closest disciples for their private practical-theological education in the New England way.12
This post-graduate education, as it were, in most cases involved various (and sometimes voluminous) assigned readings (especially where a minister, like Joseph Bellamy, for example, possessed such a well-stocked personal library), the regular composition and delivery of sermons from that minster’s “desk” (i.e., pulpit), and of chief interest here, the student’s task of answering a sort of Edwardsian-specific, catechetically-structured lists of theological questions.13 The first of these lists to appear was composed by President Edwards himself and was later developed and supplemented (exponentially) by his son, Dr. Edwards. One such list consisted of ninety questions that Edwards Jr expanded to a forbidding 313 questions. Not all of Edwards Jr’s ministerial trainees were assigned the take of answering all 313 questions. The number of questions assigned to a candidate perhaps hinged on the degree to which Edwards Jr perceived to be the needs of each individual under his instruction. For what reason we do not know, but in the case of Gelston, all of them were assigned. The intent of this otherwise rigorous ministerial education was apparently both to prepare younger, inexperienced ministers with the demands that would be upon them by their various (socially and economically diverse) congregations and, perhaps more so, to fortify the future of the New England congregational tradition with Edwardsian ideals, the erosion of which had begun no sooner than with the loss of President Edwards himself.
Gambrell’s careful study of eighteenth-century ministerial training in New England makes it clear that the disciple who seemed to have most aggressively taken up (and certainly developed) Edwards’ educational model was Joseph Bellamy.14 From the late 1750s up until his death in 1790, Bellamy undertook the private ministerial education of over sixty candidate ministers. Following the outline of his own famous True Religion Delineated,15 Bellamy imbibed his students with a sort of Calvinistically-bent moral philosophy; on one occasion, explicitly entreating them, “to preach a morally reasoned Calvinism.”16
Bellamy’s “school of prophets,” as it became known, was arguably the most significant development in the Edwardsian intellectual tradition until Nathaniel William Taylor (1786–1858) and his so-called “New Haven Theology.”17 So pervasive was Bellamy’s influence on the subsequent generations of Edwardsians, that it is more likely the case that those who would eventually claim President Edwards as their theological patriarch were more indebted to Bellamy for their theological peculiarities than they were indebted to Edwards.18 This is perhaps no more evident than by an examination of the continuities and discontinuities that persisted between Edwards, Bellamy, and their successors on doctrine of the atonement—hence our interest in a case study of atonement in Gelston and Jonathan Edwards Jr.19
For Bellamy’s part, he argued that sin was an infinite insult to God’s benevolence and the moral law that reflected it.20 Thus, Christ’s death for sinners was not intended to absolve them of their individual debts to a wrathful God. Rather, it publicly satisfied the unmet demands of the moral law, thereby restoring dignity and honor to a benevolent and merciful God.21 This emphasis is what has traditionally signaled the supposed point of theological departure for Edwards’ successors. For, consequent to such a theological alterations (amongst others)—that Christ satisfied the legal demands of the moral law for everyone—it has been long believed that Bellamy (and those after him) ultimately rejected such fundamental Calvinistic ideas as the doctrine of limited atonement.22 Accordingly, Bellamy regarded these and other innovations in his moral governmental theology as the surest means to fortifying Calvinist thought in familial, ecclesial, and civic life throughout New England. Ironically, rather than warding off the liberalizing tendencies in New England’s theology at the time, Bellamy’s innovations, and in particular those developments he made to his doctrine of the atonement, have since been used to show New England theologies eventual undoing.23
While Bellamy was perhaps the most prodigious producer of second-generation Edwardsians, Hopkins and Edwards Jr certainly played their parts in carrying on the tradition.24 Hopkins—President Edwards’ first biographer and proud purveyor the now famous notion of “Disinterested Benevolence”25—like Bellamy, was for a time mentor to Edwards Jr. In fact, it is in all likelihood that Hopkins, whose eventual attempt at the systematization of Edwardsianism (and who had been entrusted by Sarah Edwards with the bulk of her husbands manuscripts), most effectively imbibed Edwards Jr with the catechetical model of instruction that he so effectively carried forward in his own ministerial mentorship.26 This is especially evident in his mentorship of Gelston. For, as we have already mentioned, during Gelston’s three-year period of instruction he was assigned not a portion, but all 313 theological questions that Edwards Jr had compiled. This is part of the reason for Gelston’s contemporary significance. Evidence suggests that he was the only one of Edwards Jr’s students to have labored in tackling all 313 questions with full and detailed answers, thus making his Systematic Collection particularly valuable, in comparison to other (mostly partial) lists of answers that other sources might provide. Interestingly, Gelston appears to have spent the bulk of these three years composing his answers in New York while serving as a sort of interim minister himself, rather than in Edwards Jr’s home, as was so often the custom for many parsonage seminaries of the time. Besides his being assigned the colossal task of answering all 313 questions, there are few details that are known about Gelston’s particular interaction with his mentor. Perhaps Dr. Edwards’ having registered to vote his former pupil into the Sherman church indicates the endurance of their relational interaction and closeness. That no extant personal correspondence—like