Samuel Davies is a figure from colonial North America who has the unfortunate fate of competing in the historiography with Jonathan Edwards, John Witherspoon, and Gilbert Tennent. He was arguably the most important Presbyterian evangelist during his short career (he lived from 1723–1761) and almost single-handedly planted the congregations that formed Virginia's first presbytery. Davies was also an important voice in defending the rights of dissenting Protestants and so one of several influences on Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.” The recipient of a classical education, a tutor of students himself, and an avid reader of poetry and philosophy who wrote verse, Davies was also a logical choice for the trustees of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) to preside over the academic institution. In 1758, he was the successor to Jonathan Edwards at the college.
Despite these avenues of historical investigation, Joseph C. Harrod has decided to examine Davies's theology of religious experience communicated chiefly in published sermons, though the author also uses his subject's diaries and private correspondence. Harrod explores how the Bible shaped Davies's understanding of Christian experience, how Davies sought to cultivate such piety among his church members, how holiness functioned in the Christian life, and how Christian practices nurtured devotion. Harrod contends that Davies was colonial evangelicalism's “most eloquent spokesman” for the sort of experience that proponents of the awakenings sought in the church (22).
This relatively narrow range of topics also allows Harrod to organize his material in a straightforward and accessible way. After a chapter of theological and biographical context, the author devotes chapters to scripture, conversion, holiness, and the means of grace (chiefly prayer and sacraments). Although the book is explicitly an intervention into the vast literature on experimental Calvinism and the inward turn that Puritanism took (English, Scottish, and Welsh, in the case of Davies), Harrod only interacts with some of that literature in the chapter on Christian experience in relation to churchly practices. Indeed, the book at times has the feel of a manual of Christian devotion with Harrod arranging Davies's reflections and exhortations on the matter in a systematic way. The book may well occupy space on the shelves of pastors and laity today who continue to practice Christianity according to patterns that Puritans and later revivalists established.
At the same time, Harrod does use Davies to make an intervention in the recent historiography of evangelicalism. He recognizes that David Bebbington's quadrilateral (e.g., four marks that characterize an evangelical—scripture, conversion, atonement theology, and evangelism) captures much of Davies's convictions and experience. But Harrod also argues that Bebbington's analysis fails to recognize such critical features of evangelical thought as personal holiness and the work of the Holy Spirit. These themes in Davies's preaching and letters reveal the colonial Presbyterian to have more in common with the Puritans and the Reformers than Bebbington allowed for some eighteenth-century evangelicals. The influence of the Enlightenment on eighteenth-century evangelicals, according to Bebbington, allowed figures like Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley to have a higher estimate of reason than earlier Protestants. For Harrod, evangelicals like Davies could still have a high view of theology and piety without overestimating the place of reason in religious experience.
As narrow as this book's frame of reference is, Harrod's study of Davies is valuable for making accessible and arranging systematically the ideas of one of colonial Protestantism's more accomplished pastors.
