2020-07-20
Constructing Orthodoxy in the Great Awakening
Friend, Nathan Aaron
Graduate Student
History
LeMaster, Michelle ; Najar, Monica ; Baylor, Michael ; Pettegrew, John ; Raposa, Michael
text
dissertations
2015-01-01
2015
Lehigh University
eng
electronic documents
application/pdf
The Great Awakening was important as a transforming event in print culture in the British Atlantic during the end of the 1730s and early 1740s. A number of ministers collectively constructed a transatlantic correspondence network that communicated about revival-related events to each other and to a wider audience. However my study argues that outside ideological challenges were central in motivating Calvinist evangelical ministers to also utilize this network to develop a specific theology of revival. Moderate Calvinist evangelical ministers developed flexible revival orthodoxy in the Great Awakening in their print networks while in debate with other revivalists and antirevivalists. My dissertation examines what kinds of doctrines these ministers invented and how they reached agreement for what constituted normative revivalism versus what they deemed enthusiastic error. Calvinist revivalism gradually came into being around a number of loosely held ideas as ministers defended the ideas in publications with each other and in response to their opponents. The ministers experimented with how to build shared principles across denominational boundaries.
Humanities History
Conversion Great Awakening Interdenominationalism Jonathan Edwards orthodoxy Revival
https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/Record/10612980