Theology still matters in American religious history, and I cannot think of a book that makes that case more effectively than Peter Thuesen's subtle, learned account of predestination's fate (pun intended) in American history. Thuesen elucidates the significance of the question of predestination, which, as he notes, touches directly on the enduring question of what happens when we die. If there is a heaven, how does one get there? Normally, in Protestant theology, opinions on soteriology have polarized between free will and predestination, or the relative weight of human choice and God's sovereignty in sinners receiving grace and eternal bliss. But Thuesen, in his most original contribution, argues that the real debate in the broader Christian tradition (broader, that is, than just Protestantism) is between predestination and sacramentalism, or the contrast between the “utter transcendence” of God and the “efficacy of priestly sacrifice” in salvation (6–7). This debate carried out not just between Protestants and Catholics, but between Reformed Christians such as Jonathan Edwards and the congregants who booted him out of Northampton for restricting access to the Lord's Supper.
Thuesen opens with a very helpful, compact survey of predestinarian thought from Augustine to Arminius, and then sets the stage for the emergence of New England Puritanism by analyzing the theological controversies within English Protestantism as an outworking of the tension between predestination and sacramentalism. When the sacramentalists, led by Archbishop William Laud, seized control of the Anglican apparatus, it sent certain Puritan critics across the Atlantic in search of a safe home for the godly. Especially during the English Civil War, the relative freedom of the Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic generated remarkably complex theological debates about the precise nature of election. Thuesen is particularly interested in the psychological characteristics of a community who based themselves on predestination: did this belief cause a prevailing agony or ecstasy? Not surprisingly, Thuesen sees evidence for both; agony for those unsure of their status before God, ecstasy for those confident that God's eternal favor had fallen on them. In the eighteenth century, Arminian (mostly latitudinarian Anglican) critiques of predestination filtered into the colonies, even into New England, producing a predestinarian backlash that colored the revivalism of the Great Awakening. Revivalists in England, especially George Whitefield and John Wesley, split into Calvinist and Arminian camps a generation before American evangelicals did. The American leaders of the Great Awakening remained overwhelmingly committed to the idea of God's sovereignty in salvation. For someone like Jonathan Edwards, conversion itself entailed not just an acceptance of grace, but of the doctrine of unconditional election.
To Thuesen (here following Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll), the ideals of the American Revolution broke the Calvinist hegemony in America, as the Patriots' faith in liberty clashed with the ancient Christian belief in the bondage of original sin. Some mainstream American evangelicals, such as the Methodists, further elaborated the eighteenth century's doubts about unconditional election. Some former Calvinists denied that God would condemn anyone eternally, and began to propound Universalism. And unlikely combinations of believers, from radical groups such as the Mormons to liberal, well-heeled Congregationalists such as Catharine Beecher, questioned the notion of original sin itself.
Given Thuesen's emphasis on sacramentalism, it is not surprising that he includes a chapter on Catholics and Lutherans, and their attempts to “domesticate the undomesticated God of predestination” (138). Nineteenth-century Lutherans competed with earlier Puritans in the complexity (and sometimes viciousness) of their debates on salvation, yet Thuesen concludes that for most Lutherans and Catholics, the centrality of the sacraments somewhat muted predestinarian angst. Surely baptism and communion helped avert God's eternal wrath, they believed.
As with Lutherans and Catholics, Thuesen adopts a profitably comparative approach to Presbyterians and Baptists. The fact that Thuesen tends not to write chapters on single denominational traditions adds to the illuminating quality of the book, which otherwise could have become a tedious compendium of various churches and beliefs. The past century of Presbyterian and Baptist debates over predestination have played out in the context of the larger debate over the authority of the Bible. Among Presbyterians, there has been a close alignment between those who promote biblical inerrancy and those who maintain the Westminster Confession's rigorous stance on predestination (including the possibility of infant damnation).
Baptists were divided on the question of election from their early seventeenth-century origins, but in eighteenth-century America, Calvinism became the dominant Baptist position, especially among the dynamic Separate Baptists of the Great Awakening. Some branches of the Separates fed into the Primitive Baptists, who became among the most staunchly predestinarian Christians in America. The Southern Baptist Convention always featured a range of views on Calvinism, a spectrum that opened fissures in the denomination after the conservative takeover of its leadership and seminaries that began in 1979. There has been no purge in the SBC seminaries over the issue of predestination, but at times the controversy between conservatives, especially in the blogosphere, has approached the level of fury associated with blowups over inerrancy and other cultural issues.
Thuesen concludes by contemplating the way that a watered-down sense of providence has replaced predestination in megachurches such as Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. We have lost something vital and mystical in this transition, Thuesen thinks, and he would prefer even warnings of the terrors of Calvin's God to the pabulum of today's endlessly cheerful pastors.
One wonders why we do not have more books like this smartly contextualized history of a controversial doctrine. Maybe it is because so few can muster Thuesen's combination of historical depth and theological insight. Perhaps it is because publishers think books like this will be boring—and certainly in the hands of less capable authors, they could be. But Predestination is hardly boring, especially not for scholars of American religious history, for whom this book should be required reading.
