A Review Article -- By: Eric Bargerhuff

Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 10:3 (Summer 2001)
Article: A Review Article
Author: Eric Bargerhuff


A Review Article

Eric Bargerhuff

New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817, John R. Fitzmier. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1998). 261 pages, cloth, $39.95

One of the most prominent personalities in the era commonly known as the Second Great Awakening was a man by the name of Timothy Dwight. Dwight was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, a Congregational minister with outstanding oratory skills, a literary figure and theological teacher, and president of Yale College from 1795–1817.

This biography by John R. Fitzmier, who is now vice president for academic affairs and dean of the Claremont School of Theology in California, is the most recent work on the legendary figure. As such, it is an attempt to analyze Dwight’s life, his religious thought and political influence, and his legacy in the early colonial and revolutionary culture of New England. The author’s thesis of this volume, is that “Dwight’s religious system served a powerful, integrative function among what might otherwise appear to be a disparate set of professional activities. That system is ‘Godly Federalism’, and can best be seen when Dwight functions as a ‘moralist’” (20).

Fitzmier’s presuppositions regarding this period of American religious history play a key role in his whole approach and interpretation of the significance of Timothy Dwight. His perspective views the period known as the Second Great Awakening as primarily a moralistic and political movement, of which Dwight was a watershed figure. One of Dwight’s most famous students, Lyman Beecher, has written a detailed account of the revivals and awakenings of this period of Yale’s history under Dwight’s preaching and teaching. This was a period of revival where Beecher has stated that under Dwight’s preaching, “all infidelity skulked and hid its head” (15). Yet for Fitzmier, this account is merely a mythical tale of a student whose “youthful religious zeal” and undying devotion to Dwight color the accounts of the event (58). Beecher is characterized as having a “sophomoric enthusiasm and selective memory” (101). According to Fitzmier then, the way in which Dwight should most prominently be remembered and interpreted is in his ability to integrate Scottish Common Sense Realism, Edwardsean theology, and Godly Federalism into a secularized postmillennial moralism.1 There is no doubt that this ability enabled Dwight to become “the most prominent divine in turn-of-the- century New England” (101). He notes that with the mixture of his religious and political visions and ideology, which has as its focus the ushering in of the Kingd...

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