Читать книгу New England Dogmatics - Maltby Geltson - Страница 4

Within congregational circles during the colonial and early republican periods in North America, a trained and qualified ministry was considered essential for the perpetuation of thriving churches and of a godly society. Thus, seminaries for the training of pastors were established—Harvard in Massachusetts Bay, Yale in Connecticut. After the Revolution, more such seminaries multiplied. These nurseries of learning and piety were hallmarks of the society.

But there were other, less institutional settings for ministerial formation, perhaps the most important being the “parsonage seminaries” or “schools of the prophets” set up by local pastors. It was common practice for a student, having finished his baccalaureate work, to supplement or extend his training and experience, either before going on for a master’s degree, or while pursuing it. This period was called “rusticating.” The student would identify an established pastor who ran a school of the prophets with whom he wanted to live for a time—usually a year or so—during which he would be part of the minister’s family, try his hand at preaching, visitation, and other pastoral duties, and witness the domestic, social, and professional life of an ordained leader in all its aspects. He would also, under his mentor’s direction, engage in further study.

Jonathan Edwards, the famous theologian and revivalist, was one of the figures of the colonial era who rusticated seminarians-in-training, as was Jonathan Jr, the only son of the senior Edwards to become a minister, during the post-Revolutionary period. Edwards Jr did not accept as many students as did his own mentors and former students of his father, Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, but many of the ones he did accept went on to illustrious careers. Consider, for example, his nephew Timothy Dwight, who became president of Yale College and member of the literary circle known as the Connecticut Wits; Samuel Austin, pastor of the influential Fair Haven church in New Haven; Jedidiah Morse, geographer and founding member of Andover Seminary; Edward Dorr Griffin, pastor of the prestigious Park Street Church in Boston and faculty member at Andover; and Samuel Nott, pastor of Franklin, Connecticut, for an impressive tenure of seventy-two years (that has to be some kind of record), successor to Edwards Jr. as the president of the Connecticut Missionary Society, and himself the mentor of several hundred ministerial candidates.

In the manner of his father, Edwards Jr crafted a list of questions in divinity for his students to answer. Still another of Edwards Jr’s students was Maltby Gelston—hardly a household name, at least up until now. Gelston has left us his notebook containing his responses to all 313 questions posed to him by his mentor. Here we have a wonderful index of the nature of theological education in late eighteenth-century New England; of the evolution and points of controversy within Reformed theology generally; and of the continuities and changes occurring within Edwardseanism specifically. Hopefully, other such notebooks, whether by students or teachers, will emerge to help fill out some of the issues raised by Gelston’s personal version of a systematic theology. But Gelston’s notebook in and by itself is a valuable and informative source whose availability we can welcome and whose content we can plumb.

Kenneth P. Minkema

Jonathan Edwards Center

Yale University