He read three human systems of theology and one divine; that after reading the former he was in doubt which to follow, when he determined to read the latter, which he did from beginning to end with pen in hand. After this, when a new question of doctrine arose, he went, not to [Samuel] Hopkins, Ridgeley, or [President] Edwards, to see what they said, but to the Word of God, to see how it compared with that.27
Such praise bespeaks not only a respect for the tradition that Gelston no doubt, self-consciously conscripted himself to under Edwards Jr. It also suggests the theological endurance of the early doctrinal summaries that make up his Systematic Collection. For this reason, despite the lack of further, more intimate, details about his life, Gelston’s significance for our better understanding the development of the New England theological tradition is beyond question. Let us now turn our attention to the developments surrounding the doctrine of atonement in early New England Theology.
II. New England Dogmatics? A Case Study of the Atonement
There are a variety of ways we might consider and weigh the significance of Gelston’s Systematic Collection. One particularly fruitful possibility is to treat Gelston’s work as a principal resource in the following case study. To this end, in what remains of this introduction, we present a brief case study of the doctrine of atonement and its development amongst the New England theologians. This will be less of an exercise in historical theology, and more of a systematic theological inquiry. That is, our interest in Gelston’s Systematic Collection has primarily to do with whether it might cast any new theological light on a recently rekindled discussion of the atonement in Edwards and his successors.
For those acquainted with New England religious historiography proximate to the theological legacy of Jonathan Edwards, the phrase “New England dogmatics” might sound like something of a contradiction. For, there may well be no other Protestant theological tradition that, having emerged from a single source, had so quickly and so erratically developed, and had yet come to such a sudden and still curious end. This is precisely what makes the ensuing proposal so interesting. For, there is more to the story that is significant to warrant contemporary attention than has traditionally been believed. In this way, we are not suggesting that Gelston’s Systematic Collection somehow provides justification for our re-visioning the development of New England theology as a whole. Our proposal is far more modest. With this editors’ introduction we want to join a growing number of scholars in etching away at the still fairly entrenched historical narrative of so-called “decline and fall”28 that still characterizes the trajectory of Edwards’ thinking amongst his successors—something that has traditionally had a great deal to do with the doctrine of atonement.29 In this way, the difference between our proposal here and the recent revisionist proposals about the doctrine of atonement in Edwards and his successors in contemporary literature amounts to simple difference in the angle from which we are looking, and Gelston’s Systematic Collection provides just such a vantage.
With all this in mind, the remainder of this introduction unfolds in three parts to a conclusion. Following a brief sketch of President Edwards on the penal substitutionary nature of the atonement—a way of demarcating the theological landscape, as it were, with which we are principally concerned—in the first part we lay out a sort of synthetic account of the so-called moral government model of atonement that has traditionally characterized Edwards’ successors. Then, in part two, we consider a recent account of Jonathan Edwards Jr’s moral government model offered up by Oliver Crisp. In the part three, we lay out evidence that suggests that Edwards Jr’s model of what Crisp calls “Penal Non-Substitution” is doctrinally “thicker” than Crisp suggests. We then pivot to a discussion of the dozen or so questions and answers about the atonement that Gelston’s Systematic Collection offers and consider how his answers to these questions bear upon our understanding of the atonement as it developed in New England around the time of the American Revolution. Here too, as with Edwards J., we will see evidence that some version of the doctrine of penal substitution, though diminished in part, remains a piece of the doctrinal furniture of this second generation Edwardsian. Let us turn now and briefly consider President Edwards on the atonement after which we layout our synthetic approach to the moral government model of atonement.
II.1. Atonement and the Moral Government of God
Until recently, and for more than a century, scholars have maintained that President Edwards’ musings about the atonement gave rise to a form of the moral government theory of the atonement that his successors embraced and developed, (roughly) according to which Christ dies in order to satisfy the rectoral rather than the retributive demands of God’s moral law.30 In this way, Christ performs the work of a penal example, whereby he vindicates God’s moral law and government without vicariously substituting himself for particular individuals, as in the case of penal substitution. Christ thus satisfies the legal demands of the moral law for everyone, not as a means of releasing them from their individual and particular debts to divine retribution. Rather, Christ dies to satisfy the unmet demands of the moral law, which in turn restores dignity or honor to God—the lawmaker.
This atonement narrative has seemingly reached a point of argumentative entropy in the literature, what with evidence that has more recently been held out that recommends President Edwards’ subscription to a version of the penal substitution theory of atonement. On this theory, Christ willingly assumes the legal responsibility for the sin(s) of human beings and by his substitutionary death pays their debt of punishment in order to satisfy God’s retributive rather than his rectoral justice.31 The recent suggestion that the so-called Northampton Sage may in fact have articulated such a doctrine has in part motivated a set of serious inquests into his successor’s doctrinal formulations, the most serious of which have been put forward in two articles by Oliver Crisp.32 In the first, Crisp directs his attention to Bellamy’s doctrine of atonement and convincingly recasts the “decline-and-fall narrative” as a story of doctrinal development—a move that has motivated much of the ensuing analysis. In the second article, Crisp offers up a thoroughgoing and rigorously systematic analysis of Edwards Jr’s doctrine of atonement. Crisp’s analysis of Edwards Jr ultimately distances him from the possibility—if his father did hold to some version of the penal substitution theory—that he carried on this aspect of the Reformed theological tradition.
So in order to distinguish, better still, isolate Edwards Jr’s thinking about the moral government theory from his fellow Edwardsians, let us consider a sort of “core sample” of features of the New England version of the moral government theory.33 By core sample we mean a sort of collation of ideas about the atonement that developed during the first, second, and third generations of Edwards’ intellectual tradition. Such a survey will bring us close to the heart of our understanding what it means for New England theologians to have been harangued with a decline and fall narrative until recently. For the sake of brevity and clarity, we set out this core sample in the following series of numbered theses, interspersed with both primary source evidence and some explanatory comments. For a more detailed discussion of these some of these features, we direct our readers elsewhere.34 We begin with:
1) God is the moral governor of the universe.35
That is, God is the supreme authority over all creation, including his morally responsible creatures. God’s government is his power, according to which his infinite wisdom and