Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 25:1 (Mar 1982)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

JETS 25:1 (March 1982) p. 95

Book Reviews

The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism. By Richard F. Lovelace. Washington, DC: Christian College Consortium (subsidiary of Eerdmans), 1979, x + 350 pp., $9.95 paper.

A book about Cotton Mather ought not to be as ponderous as its subject, for in spite of his prolific literary output Cotton Mather is not dull. There is within him a passion for all life—natural and mystical. It is that enthusiasm that ought to be distilled from his often tedious tomes and passed on to us. Unhappily, the reader of this book will find that Lovelace has produced more tedium than passion. While there are glimmers of a more fervent style in these pages, overall the book plods through the spiritual life of Mather, and the reader needs to prepare to make haste slowly. One senses that Lovelace has approached his subject almost as a pretext—i.e., not to portray the romance of Mather’s spirit but to promote an agenda for twentieth-century evangelicalism with Mather as a foil.

American Pietism is a revision of the author’s 1968 Princeton Th.D. thesis (“Christian Experience in the Theology of Cotton Mather”). The major goal of the work is a rehabilitation of the oft-maligned Bostonian by tracing his internal spiritual experience along with his interaction with and influence upon the broad stream of evangelical pietism (continental, British and American). In other words, Lovelace has presented us with a specimen of Puritan “experimentalism.”

Our author is sympathetic toward but not uncritical of his subject. The miscreant portrayed by nineteenth-century scholarship is in fact a tender, sensitive and compassionate pastor. Though zealous for Calvinistic orthodoxy, Mather possessed a catholic spirit in his close Christian bonds with other evangelicals (notably Francke and Spener). His efforts to promote greater evangelical unity in New England were a concrete expression of this evangelical ecumenicity (pp. 251-281). Mather was also active in promoting reforming societies designed to minister to the social needs of his neighbors. He was a vigorous advocate of missions that, Lovelace points out, was a by-product of his atypical premillennialism. Finally, Mather’s theology exhibits the richness of treasures gathered from many veins of Christian tradition: Scripture, patristic, medieval and scholastic, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, English Puritanism, continental pietism. I would add that Mather is not exceptional in this regard. Almost all Puritans devoured the literature of the Church in an effort to mine treasures old and new.

Our author seeks to exonerate Mather of three stinging indictments. Perhaps the most damning is his involvement in the Salem witch trials. Lovelace shows that Mather, as wel...