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“Search the Scriptures; Search Your Experiences”: Reading the Bible Spiritually from the Reformation to Early Evangelicalism

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Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment

Part of the book series: Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World ((CTAW))

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Abstract

“How shall we prove the Spirit?” asked an exasperated Martin Luther (1483–1546) amid his battles with Rome, enthusiasts, and Erasmus over the proper interpretation of Scripture. The question would absorb Protestants for generations to come. Seeking a form of knowledge that offered not only certainty but also intimacy with God, they laid increasing weight on the authority of spiritual experience to discern the voice, light, and affections of the Spirit in the Word. While interest in this dynamic interaction among the Spirit, Scripture, and experience long preceded the Reformation—as seen in the writings of early church fathers, Christian mystic traditions, and the devotio moderna movement—it became especially integral to early Protestant efforts to reconstruct the foundations of faith and religious authority independent of the magisterium. Eighteenth-century awakened Protestants, such as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, would carry the quest for experiential religion by the Word and Spirit in new times as they labored to revive Protestant Christendom in true and vital religion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will [1526], in Luther’s Works, ed. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957), 33:89 (hereafter LW).

  2. 2.

    For more on the history of biblical interpretation in the early and medieval church, see Magne Sæbo, ed., Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, I: From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (Until 1300) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996); and Henning Graf Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung. Band I: Vom Alten Testament bis Origenes (München: C.H. Beck, 1990), Epochen der Bibelauslegung. Band II: Von der Spätantike bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters (München: C.H. Beck, 1994).

  3. 3.

    David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), 44.

  4. 4.

    Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12, 11.

  5. 5.

    See Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993), 2.1–69, 465–539 (hereafter PRRD); Muller, “Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation: The View from the Middle Ages,” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson, eds. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 3–16. For more on biblical interpretation and practices in the Reformation era, see, among others, Jaroslav Pelikan, The Reformation Bible and the Bible of the Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Henning Graf Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung. Band III: Renaissance, Reformation, Humanismus (München: C.H. Beck, 1997); David Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 111–375; Bruce Gordon and Matthew McLean, ed., Shaping the Bible in the Reformation: Books, Scholars, and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2012); and Timothy George, ed., The Reformation Commentary on Scripture, 28 vols. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011–).

  6. 6.

    Luther, Bondage, LW 33:91. Here Luther makes his classic distinction between internal and external judgments and explains the need for both when interpreting Scripture.

  7. 7.

    Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 86. See Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John: Chapters 14−16, in LW, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1961), 24:110−32.

  8. 8.

    Luther, The Magnificat, in LW, trans. A. T. W. Steinhaeuser, 21:299. For the German, see Martin Luther, Das Magnificat verdeutschet und ausgelegt, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1897), 7:546 (hereafter WA). For more on Luther’s exegesis and theology of Scripture, see, among others, Friedrich Beißer, Claritas Scripturae bei Martin Luther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966); Werner Führer, Das Wort Gottes in Luthers Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984); Reventlow, Epochen, 3:68–90; and Siegfried Raeder, “The Exegetical and Hermeneutical Work of Martin Luther,” in Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, II: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Magne Sæbo (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 363–405. Recent scholarship has also labored to connect Luther more directly to the mystic tradition; see Volker Leppin, Die fremde Reformation: Luthers mystische Wurzeln (München: C. H. Beck, 2017).

  9. 9.

    Ulrich Zwingli, On the Certainty and Clarity of the Word, in Zwingli and Bullinger, trans. and ed. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 88, 91, 93–95.

  10. 10.

    For more on the exegesis of Müntzer and Franck, see Reventlow, Epochen, 3:140–58, 3:167–78.

  11. 11.

    Martin Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments, 1525, in LW, ed. Conrad Bergendoff, 40:73−223; Luther, Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von den Bildern und Sacrament. 1525, in WA, 18:22−214.

  12. 12.

    Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 96.

  13. 13.

    Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 209, 211, 256.

  14. 14.

    Sebastian Franck, 280 Paradoxes or Wondrous Sayings, trans. E. J. Furcha (Lewiston/Queenstown: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 209; quoted by Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 252–53.

  15. 15.

    For more on this group and their reform efforts, see Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Some scholars have argued that Beza and the English Puritan tradition departed from Calvin’s understanding of soteriology and assurance by laying greater weight on inward religious experience. I find this claim overstated. Cf. R. T. Kendall Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 9−12.

  16. 16.

    John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. XX of The Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 1:92, 74, 78. For more on Calvin’s exegesis and understanding of spiritual knowledge, see, among others, Werner Krusche, Das Wirken des Heiligen Geistes nach Calvin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957); Gottfried W. Locher, “Testimonium internum: Calvins Lehre vom Heilige Geist und das hermeneutische Problem,” Theologische Studien 81 (1964), 4–30; Alexandre Ganoczy and Stefan Scheld, Die Hermeneutik Calvins: Geistliche Voraussetzungen und Grungzüge (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1983); Peter Opitz, Calvins Theologische Hermeneutik (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlag, 1994); “The Exegetical and Hermeneutical Work of John Oecolampadius, Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:407–451; Willem Balke, “Revelation and Experience in Calvin’s Theology,” in Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions, ed. David Willis and Michael Welker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 346−65; and Donald K. McKim, ed., Calvin and the Bible (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  17. 17.

    Calvin, Institutes, 1:580–82.

  18. 18.

    Calvin, Institutes, 1:581, 583–84, 581.

  19. 19.

    Calvin, Institutes, 1:96.

  20. 20.

    Schreiner, “‘The Spiritual Man Judges All Things’: Calvin and the Exegetical Debates About Certainty in the Reformation,” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, Muller and Thompson, eds. 212; Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 111–12.

  21. 21.

    Calvin, Institutes, 1:80, 79.

  22. 22.

    See, among others, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, 1904−1905], trans. by Talcott Parsons (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930); Robert Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment’ of the World,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23:3 (Winter 1993): 475−94; and Gregory, Unintended Reformation.

  23. 23.

    Carlos M. N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450−1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 317, 747. Eire prefers the term desacralization to disenchantment and secularization, as “desacralization is a process of subtraction from within, of Christians eagerly reducing the scope of the supernatural on earth, rather than a process of erosion by external factors of any kind, be they political, social, economic, cultural, or intellectual.” He does not deny the influence of external factors but wishes to demonstrate how Protestants themselves “were aggressive agents in the process of desacralization.” Ibid., 748. For a fuller study on this transformation, see Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

    Eire’s approach complements the framework of this study which aims to show how the transformations of piety in early evangelicalism (in continuity with the Reformation) represented an active and dynamic force of modernization rather than a mere unintended consequence of secularizing processes.

  24. 24.

    For more on Protestant Orthodoxy and exegesis, see Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2; “Biblical Interpretation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. Donald K. McKim (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 22–44; Johann Anselm Steiger, “The Development of the Reformation Legacy: Hermeneutics and Interpretation of the Sacred Scripture in the Age of Orthodoxy,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:691–757; Steiger, Philologia Sacra: Zur Exegese der Heiligen Schrift im Protestantismus des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Theologie Verlag, 2011); Carl R. Trueman, “Scripture and Exegesis in Early Modern Reformed Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600−1800, Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller, and A. G. Roeber, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 179−94; and Benjamin T. G. Mayes, “Scripture and Exegesis in Early Modern Lutheranism,” in ibid., 283−97.

  25. 25.

    Johann Gerhard, Tractatus de legitima scripturae sacrae interpretatione (1610): Lateinsich-Deutsch, ed. Johann Anselm Steiger (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2007), 85. This volume contains the Latin (1610) and German (1612) editions; all quotations are my translations of the German: Von Außlegung der Heiligen Schrifft, trans. and ed. Johann Berners (Franckfurt am Mayn: Erasmo Kempffern, 1612). For more on Gerhard’s biblical interpretation, see Henning Graf Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung. Band IV: Von der Aufklärung bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (München: C.H. Beck, 2001), 4:21–30; and Reinhard Kirste, Das Zeugnis des Geistes und das Zeugnis der Schrift: das testimonium spiritus sancti internum als hermeneutisch-polemischer Zentralbegriff bei Johann Gerhard in der Auseinandersetzung mit Robert Bellarmins Schriftverständnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976). William Ames was another avid opponent of Bellarmine’s views on Scripture, as seen in his work, Scriptum Elenchticum contra Papistas vid. Bellarminus Enervatus in 4 Tomos Divisus (1625–1629).

  26. 26.

    Gerhard, Tractatus, 27.

  27. 27.

    Gerhard, Tractatus, 87–91.

  28. 28.

    Gerhard, Tractatus, 89–91.

  29. 29.

    Gerhard, Tractatus, 97.

  30. 30.

    Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Harrison’s study interacts with the Puritanism and science thesis; see his footnotes on pp. 5−7 for more literature on this topic.

  31. 31.

    Muller, PRRD, 2.466.

  32. 32.

    For more on William Perkins, see D. K. McKim, “Perkins, William (1558–1602),” in Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. McKim, 815–19; the introductory essays in William Perkins, A Commentary on Galatians, ed. Gerald T. Sheppard (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989); and Andrew Ballitch, The Gloss and the Text: William Perkins on Interpreting Scripture with Scripture (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2020). For more on the role of the Holy Spirit in Puritanism, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Nuttall, however, overstates the innovativeness of seventeenth-century Puritan representations of the relationship between the Spirit and Christian experience. He not only misrepresents Calvin as holding that “the Holy Spirit is a necessity of thought rather than something known in experience,” but he also misleadingly downplays the role of the Spirit in medieval theology as well as post-Reformation continental Lutheran and Reformed Orthodoxy. Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 6–7. For more on the Puritans and the Bible, see Gerald R. Cragg, Freedom and Authority: A Study of English Thought in the Early Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), especially 127–58; Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1994); and Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  33. 33.

    William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying: Or, A Treatise Concerning the Sacred and Onely True Manner and Methode of Preaching, trans. by Thomas Tuke (London: Felix Kyngston, 1607), 30–31. Perkins affirmed his indebtedness for this work to the early church father Augustine, the humanist Desiderius Erasmus, and continental Protestant writers such as Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Theodore Beza, and Franciscus Junius. Perkins, Arte, 148.

  34. 34.

    Gordis, Opening Scripture, 23.

  35. 35.

    Perkins, Arte, 28.

  36. 36.

    Perkins, Arte, 5, 17, 19, 18.

  37. 37.

    Perkins, Arte, 30, 31, 32.

  38. 38.

    William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. and ed. John D. Eusden (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1997), 188. For more on Ames and his legacy in Puritan New England, see Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames (Urbana, Il: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 254–58. Perry Miller demonstrates the pervasive influence of Ames’ theology in New England, namely his voluntarism, technometry, Ramist logic, and understanding of theology as “the doctrine of living to God.” See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1939).

  39. 39.

    Gordis, Opening Scripture, 23. Gordis contrasts this hermeneutic approach with Roland Barthes’ assertion that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 148.

  40. 40.

    John White, A Way to the Tree of Life: Discovered in Sundry Directions for the Profitable Reading of the Scriptures (London: Printed by M. F. for R. Royston, 1647), 8.

  41. 41.

    Perkins, Arte, 31–32, 32, 46.

  42. 42.

    Perkins, Arte, 132–34.

  43. 43.

    Perkins, Arte, 137, 140. Ames elaborated on how ministers demonstrate the power of the Spirit in preaching in a “Sermon on First Corinthians,” in The Philosophical and Theological Treatises of William Ames, trans. and ed. Lee W. Gibbs (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mullen Press, 2013), 266–76.

  44. 44.

    Perkins, Arte, 31.

  45. 45.

    The first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) states: “we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word.” The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, Now by Authority of Parliament Sitting at Westminster (London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1647), 5. For more on Ames’ relationship with theologians and ministers in the Netherlands, see Sprunger, Ames, 209–46. For more on the connections between movements of piety in English Puritanism and European Protestantism, see F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden: Brill, 1965). Anthony Milton argues that English Puritanism appealed not so much to the continental Reformed churches themselves but to reform movements within them, especially in the Netherlands and Hungary. Anthony Milton, “Puritanism and the Continental Reformed Churches,” in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, eds. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 109–126.

  46. 46.

    Reventlow, Epochen, 4:35. Several Puritans during the Laudian era, such as Richard Sibbes, deemed much of the Puritan movement’s liturgical and formal precisionism as pertaining to adiaphorous matters and they focused more on experiential religion as the chief means of true reform. This point does not mean to diminish the continuity between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritanism, but merely to stress a shift in emphasis.

  47. 47.

    Lewis Bayly, The Practise of Pietie (London: Printed for John Hodgetts, 1619), 244. Its popularity extended beyond England, appearing in at least 164 editions in eleven languages. Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 319.

  48. 48.

    Bayly, Practise of Pietie, 245–46. For more on Puritan practical divinity, see Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), especially 157−61 on New England Bible reading practices; Hambrick-Stowe, “Practical Divinity and Spirituality,” in Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, Coffey and Lim, eds. 191–205; David R. Como, Blown By the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Anti-nomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 117–37; and David D. Hall: The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 109−143.

  49. 49.

    White, Tree of Life, 126–27.

  50. 50.

    For one example of the legacy of Perkins’ approach to interpretation and preaching in New England divinity, see Rudolph P. Almasy, “Richard Hooker, Reformed Sermon Making, and the Use of Scripture,” in Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy, W. Bradford Littlejohn and Scott N. Kindred-Barnes, eds. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 155−74.

  51. 51.

    John Cotton, Mr. Cotton’s Rejoynder, in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, ed. David D. Hall, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 141. Quoted in Gordis, Opening Scripture, 170–71. See Edward H. Davidson, “John Cotton’s Biblical Exegesis: Method and Purpose,” Early American Literature 17 (1982): 119−38.

  52. 52.

    Thomas Shepard, Of Ineffectual Hearing the Word [1642], in Subjection to Christ (London: Rothwell, 1652), 156–57.

  53. 53.

    Shepard, Ineffectual Hearing, 189.

  54. 54.

    Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Recent studies have reinforced this transatlantic continuum. See Michael Winship, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); and Hall: Puritans: A Transatlantic History.

  55. 55.

    Gordis, Opening Scripture, 11.

  56. 56.

    Muller, PRRD, 2.465–69. For more on the historical development of higher critical approaches to Scripture, see, among others, Hans-Joachim Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments, 2nd ed. (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlag, 1969); Frei, Eclipse; Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); Klaus Scholder, The Birth of Modern Critical Theology: Origins and Problems of Biblical Criticism in the Seventeenth Century, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1990); Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible; Legaspi, Death of Scripture; and Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  57. 57.

    As Johann Anselm Steiger asserts, “the common conviction that Orthodoxy discarded the rigorous philological alignment of theology coined by Humanism and that only in Pietism was philology recalled again, testifies to ignorance of the Orthodox exegetical literature.” Steiger rightly challenges common misrepresentations of exegesis in the era of Orthodoxy, especially “the claim that serious scholarly (that is, historical) exegesis only became scientifically critical in the age of Enlightenment.” He submits that representatives of this view take more interest in looking “for signs of the dawning of modernity in past eras” and tracing “the prehistory of one’s own way of thinking” than in following the sources. Steiger, “Interpretation in the Age of Orthodoxy,” 2:741, 700.

  58. 58.

    Gerhard, Tractatus, 113–15.

  59. 59.

    Ames, Marrow, 188.

  60. 60.

    William Ames, Technometry, trans. and ed. Lee W. Gibbs (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 100–101. For more on the influence of Ramism and technometry in New England, see pages 41–60 in Gibb’s “Introduction.” See also Perry Miller, New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; Lee W. Gibbs, “William Ames’s Technometry,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33:4 (Oct.–Dec., 1972), 615–24; and Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 25–28, 61, 120–25.

  61. 61.

    Ames, Marrow, 77–78.

  62. 62.

    Ames, Technometry, 103–104.

  63. 63.

    Ames, Technometry, 113.

  64. 64.

    Ames, Technometry, 104–105. Lee notes that “Ames’s synthesis of Aristotelian empiricism (whereby the principles and precepts of the arts are gathered from created things) and Neoplatonic idealism (wherein the principles and precepts of art are archetypal ideas in the mind of God) was by no means totally alien either to the empiricism and idealism of Locke and Berkeley or to the new experimental science propounded by Bacon.” These themes dominated the seventeenth century and there was no clear-cut opposition between religious belief and Enlightenment epistemologies. Even more, contrary to the common representation of Edwards (most strongly expressed by Perry Miller) as totally replacing technologia with Lockean empiricism, Lee argues the Puritan technologia remained “one important and abiding source of certain idealist and empiricist strains in his philosophical thought.” Lee, “Introduction,” in Ames, Technometry, 50, 54.

  65. 65.

    Adrian Schenker, “The Polyglot Bible of Antwerp, Paris and London: 1568–1658,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:774–84.

  66. 66.

    Reventlow, Epochen, 4:79–82.

  67. 67.

    Stephen G. Burnett, “Later Christian Hebraists,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:789; Burnett, Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

  68. 68.

    For more on Richard Simon, see John D. Woodbridge, “Richard Simon’s Reaction to Spinoza’s ‘Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,’” in Spinoza in der Frühzeit seiner religiösen Wirkung, ed. Karlfried Gründer and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1984), 201–226; J. A. I. Champion, “Père Richard Simon and English Biblical Criticism, 1680–1700,” in Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin: Essays in His Honor, James E. Force and David S. Katz, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 1999); and John W. Rogerson, “Early Roman Catholic Critics,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:838–43.

  69. 69.

    For more on the exegesis of the Dutch Arminian jurist and scholar Hugo Grotius, see Reventlow, Epochen, 3:211–25; Reventlow, “Humanistic Exegesis: The Famous Hugo Grotius,” in Creative Biblical Exegesis, Benjamin Uffenheimer and Henning Graf Reventlow, eds. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988), 175–91; and H. J. M. Nellen, “Tension Between Church Doctrines and Critical Exegesis of the Old Testament,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:808–17.

  70. 70.

    Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–1657),” Journal of the History of Ideas 62:3 (July, 2001), 467, 474.

  71. 71.

    Miller, “‘Antiquarianization,’” 478.

  72. 72.

    John Owen, Of the Divine Originall, Authority, Self-evidencing Light, and Power of the Scriptures (Oxford: Henry Hall, 1659), Dedicatory, unpaginated. John Owen served as chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and he was the primary architect of The Savoy Declaration (1658), the Independent adaptation of the Westminster Confession which enjoyed widespread acceptance among New England Congregationalists. For more on Owen and especially his exegesis, see, among others, Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Gribben, “Reading the Bible: John Owen and Early Evangelical ‘Biblicism,’” in Bible in Pietism and Evangelicalism, ed. Hoselton et al., 73−90; and Andrew M. Leslie, The Light of Grace: John Owen on the Authority of Scripture and Christian Faith (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).

  73. 73.

    Owen, Divine Originall, 10–11.

  74. 74.

    Owen, Divine Originall, 12–14.

  75. 75.

    John Owen, The Reason of Faith, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 4, ed. William Goold (Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–53; reprinted, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2004), 4–109, 15.

  76. 76.

    Owen, Reason of Faith, 70.

  77. 77.

    Owen, Reason of Faith, 64.

  78. 78.

    Owen, Reason of Faith, 56. For more on how Owen’s notion of a “visive faculty” relates to Edwards’ Christology, see Kyle C. Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 128–30.

  79. 79.

    John Owen, The Causes, Ways, and Means of Understanding the Mind of God as Revealed in His Word, with Assurance Therein, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 4, ed. William Goold (Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–53; reprinted, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2004), 118–226, 126.

  80. 80.

    See Steiger, “Interpretation in the Age of Orthodoxy,” 2:751.

  81. 81.

    Examples of this optimism in harnessing the latest methods and advancements in natural learning for both the explication and defense of Scripture include John Edwards, Discourse concerning the Authority, Stile, and Perfection of the Old and New Testament (London, 1693–95); Edmund Dickinson, Physica Vetus & Vera (London, 1702); Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologia Sacra (London, 1710); and Robert Hooke, Lectures and Discourses Earthquakes and Subterraneous Eruptions (London, 1705). See Reiner Smolinski, “Editor’s Introduction,” BA, 1:94.

  82. 82.

    See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  83. 83.

    Charles H. Parker, Global Calvinism: Conversion and Commerce in the Dutch Empire, 1600–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 247–49.

  84. 84.

    Peter Harrison, “Experimental Religion and Experimental Science in Early Modern England,” Intellectual History Review 21:4 (2011): 413−33, especially 416. See also Harrison, “Sentiments of Devotion and Experimental Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44:1 (Winter 2014): 113−33; Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 83−116, 157−58; and Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  85. 85.

    Steve Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 13, 12; also Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and The Experimental Life (1985; rev. ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

  86. 86.

    For more on the variety and complexity of the relationship between biblical interpretation and shifting conceptions of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw, eds., The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

  87. 87.

    Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 112–13. For more on Spinoza’s thought and exegesis, see Richard H. Popkin, “Some New Light on the Roots of Spinoza’s Science of Bible Study,” in Spinoza and the Sciences, Marjorie Grene and Debra Nails, eds. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), 171–88; “Spinoza and Biblical Scholarship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 383–407; and J. Samuel Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen Unwin, 1981); and Israel, Philosophy and the Making of Modernity; Israel, Radical Enlightenment.

  88. 88.

    Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 98.

  89. 89.

    Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 168. See Stephen Nadler, “The Bible Hermeneutics of Baruch de Spinoza,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:834–35.

  90. 90.

    Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 116, 111, 102, 104, 111.

  91. 91.

    Michael P. Winship, Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 44. Isabel Rivers concludes, “The re-establishment of the Church of England at the Restoration in effect guaranteed the dominance of moral, rational religion and the defeat of Reformation orthodoxy,” in Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780. Vol. I: Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1. Others have challenged this interpretation, however, arguing that Reformed Protestantism had a continuing presence into the eighteenth century and transformed rather than diminished in the face of new circumstances in England and its colonies. See Dewey J. Wallace Jr. Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

    For more on biblical interpretation, scholarship, and uses of the Bible in early modern England, see Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530−1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  92. 92.

    Winship, Seers of God, 42, 29–52. See also Gerard Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Norman Fiering, “The First American Enlightenment: Tillotson, Leverett, and Philosophical Anglicanism,” New England Quarterly 54:3 (1981): 307−44; and Chapman, “Reasonable Faith.”

    Christopher Haigh has shown how Restoration-era Nonconformists also embraced rationalism and resisted Anglican attempts to discredit them as irrational enthusiasts. Haigh, “The Church of England, the Nonconformists and Reason: Another Restoration Controversy,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 69:3 (July 2018), 531−56.

  93. 93.

    For more on the Enlightenment and transformations in religious belief in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, see Gerald R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason: A Study of Changes in Religious Thought Within the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, vol. 2, From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1603–1690 (1975, reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996); John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science; B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics During the Ancien Régime, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000); Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); James E. Bradley, “The Changing Shape of Religious Ideas in Enlightened England,” in Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory, eds. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 175–201; and Ruth Savage, ed., Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain: New Case Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  94. 94.

    For more on Hobbes, see Reventlow, Epochen, 4:39–57; and Paul D. Cook, Hobbes and Christianity: Reassessing the Bible in Leviathan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).

  95. 95.

    John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). For more on Locke as a biblical interpreter, see Reventlow, Epochen, 4:57–71, Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, 243–85; and A. W. Wainwright, “Locke, John,” in McKim, Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, 668–71.

  96. 96.

    Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 619. For fuller context, read Book 4.9–11, pp. 618–39.

  97. 97.

    John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. I. T. Ramsey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 25, 32.

  98. 98.

    Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 694–95.

  99. 99.

    Henning Graf Reventlow, “English Deism and Anti-Deist Apologetic,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:855. For more on Locke’s defense of the authority of Scripture, see Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Proof of the Divine Authority of Scripture,” in Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain, ed. Savage, 56–76. For more on deism and the Bible, see Diego Lucci, Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-Century British Deists (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008).

  100. 100.

    Locke, Paraphrase on Corinthians, 12, 16.

  101. 101.

    John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (London: 1696; repr. London: Routledge, 1995), 128, viii–ix, 151. See Reventlow, “English Deism,” 861. For another important deist work on Scripture, see Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation: or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London, 1730).

  102. 102.

    Reventlow, “English Deism,” 862–64.

  103. 103.

    Taylor, Secular Age, 221–24.

  104. 104.

    Taylor, Secular Age, 149.

  105. 105.

    See, among others, Ward, Protestant Evangelical Awakening; Ward, Early Evangelicalism; and Rivett, “Early American Religion in a Postsecular Age,” 993. For further studies on the rise of evangelicalism, see Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain; Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” The American Historical Review 91:4 (Oct. 1986), 811–32; Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991); Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Hindmarsh, The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Kidd, Great Awakening; John Coffey, ed., Heart Religion: Evangelical Piety in England and Ireland, 1690−1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Winiarski, Darkness Falls.

  106. 106.

    Catherine A. Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 7. See also Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

  107. 107.

    Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 2, 15; Brekus, “Sarah Osborn’s Enlightenment,” 112, 123−24.

  108. 108.

    Taylor, A Secular Age, 541.

  109. 109.

    Hindmarsh, Spirit of Early Evangelicalism, 104.

  110. 110.

    Ward, Early Evangelicalism, 7−23.

  111. 111.

    Hindmarsh, Spirit of Early Evangelicalism, 101−179.

  112. 112.

    Noll, In the Beginning Was the Word, 190.

  113. 113.

    Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104. Green contrasts his findings with Christopher Hill, English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. See also Isabel Rivers, Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England 1720–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 213−47; and Rivers, “Biblical Aids, Editions, Translations, and Commentaries by Dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England Evangelicals in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Bible in Pietism and Evangelicalism, ed. Hoselton et al., 36−52.

  114. 114.

    Philip Doddridge, The Family Expositor, Vol. 1 (London: John Wilson, 1756), Preface, i–ii. It is worth noting that alongside the “Reverends” and “Sirs,” many lay men and women were included in the long “List of Subscribers Names” section to purchase the commentary volumes. See Robert Strivens, Phillip Doddridge and the Shaping of Evangelical Dissent (New York: Routledge, 2015), and Tessa Whitehouse, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720−1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 177−94.

  115. 115.

    Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Five Books of Moses (London: T. Parkhurst, 1707), Preface. See Scott Mandelbrote, “A Family Bible? The Henrys and Dissenting Readings of the Bible, 1650–1750,” in Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c. 1650–1950, Scott Mandelbrote and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 38–56.

  116. 116.

    Hindmarsh, Spirit of Early Evangelicalism, 27−32.

  117. 117.

    Green, Print and Protestantism, 164. For more on literacy and Scripture reading practices in seventeenth-century New England, see David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 21−70.

  118. 118.

    Frei, Eclipse, 105–23; Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 31–53; Steiger, “Hermeneutics and Interpretation in the Age of Orthodoxy,” 2:751–57. Though Steiger may be overstating it when he writes that “apologetics within late Orthodoxy ranked above fundamental hermeneutical work” (752), their heightened preoccupation with apologetics greatly shaped their exegetical program.

  119. 119.

    Doddridge, for example, included notes and references for secondary literature throughout his commentary to guide “young students” in “studying the evidences and contents, both of natural and revealed religion.” Doddridge, Family Expositor, Preface, iv.

  120. 120.

    Brekus, Osborn’s World, 9.

  121. 121.

    Sarah Osborn, The Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity (1755), in Sarah Osborn’s Collected Writings, ed. Catherine A. Brekus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 109.

  122. 122.

    See Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 190–91.

  123. 123.

    Isaac Watts, An Humble Attempt Toward the Revival of Practical Religion Among Christians (London: E. Matthews, 1731), 67–68.

  124. 124.

    Isaac Watts, The Doctrine of the Passions Explained and Improved (London: 1729), 29.

  125. 125.

    John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1988), 248−49.

  126. 126.

    George Whitefield, Sermons on Various Important Subjects (Boston, 1741), ix.

  127. 127.

    Jacob Siegmund Baumgarten, Theologische Lehrsätze von den Grundwarheiten der christlichen Lehre (Halle, 1747), 299 (translations mine). See Steiger, “Interpretation in the Age of Orthodoxy,” 2:754–55.

  128. 128.

    Doddridge, Family Expositor, Preface, vi.

  129. 129.

    John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (Bristol: William Pine, 1765), Preface, iv–v.

  130. 130.

    John Wesley and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (London, 1740), 41−42.

  131. 131.

    George Whitefield, The Knowledge of Jesus Christ, The Best Knowledge (London, 1739). Emphasis original. See also similar sermons such as The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth in Christ Jesus (London, 1737, rev. edition 1741, Boston) and The Indwelling of the Spirit, the Common Privilege of all Believers (London, 1739).

  132. 132.

    John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (London: Printed by William Bowyer, 1755), 428. See also John Wesley, “Sermon X: ‘The Witness of the Spirit,’ Discourse I” and “Sermon XI: ‘The Witness of the Spirit,’ Discourse II,” [1746] in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 5 ([1771]; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), 111−23, 123−34.

  133. 133.

    For more on how early evangelicals interacted with empiricism and especially the thought of John Locke, see Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 47−65.

  134. 134.

    For more on the relationship between continental Pietism and Anglophone early evangelicalism, see, among others, F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism; Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973); and F. Ernest Stoeffler, ed., Continental Pietism and Early American Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976); Geoffrey G. Nuttall, “Continental Pietism and the Evangelical Movement in Britain,” in Pietismus und Reveil, J. Van den Berg and J. P. Van Dooren, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 1978); Ward, Protestant Evangelical Awakening; and Early Evangelicalism; Scott Kisker, “Pietist Connections with English Anglicans and Evangelicals,” in A Companion to German Pietism, 1660−1800, ed. Douglas H. Shantz (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 225−55; J. Steven O’Malley, “Pietism and Transatlantic Revivals,” in ibid., 256−89; Jan Stievermann, “German Lutheran and Reformed Protestants,” in Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism, ed. Yeager, 95–116; and Hoselton et al., ed., Bible in Pietism and Evangelicalism.

  135. 135.

    For more on the historical roots and early stages of Pietism, see especially Martin Brecht, ed., Geschichte des Pietismus, Band 1: Der Pietismus vom Siebzehnten bis zum Frühen Achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993). For more on Pietism and biblical exegesis, see Kurt Aland, ed., Pietismus und Bibel (Witten, Germany: Luther-Verlag, 1970); Reventlow, Epochen, 4:126–226; Martin Brecht, “Die Bedeutung der Bibel im deutschen Pietismus,” in Geschichte des Pietismus: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004); Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 204–36; Shantz, “Bible Editions, Translations, and Commentaries in German Pietism,” in Bible in Pietism and Evangelicalism, ed. Hoselton et al., 17−35; Johannes Wallmann, “Scriptural Understanding and Interpretation in Pietism,” in HBOT, ed. Sæbo, 2:902–25; and Susanne Luther, “Schriftverständnis im Pietismus,” and Thomas Hahn-Bruckart, “Bibel,” in Pietismus Handbuch, Wolfgang Breul and Thomas Hahn-Bruckart, eds. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 349−59 and 420−27. There is also a good deal of scholarship on Pietism and the Enlightenment; see, among others, Martin Griel, “Pietism, Enlightenment, and Modernity,” in Companion to German Pietism, ed. Shantz, 348−92.

  136. 136.

    …“das Wort Gottes reichlicher unter uns zu bringen.” “…daß also die Leut zu der privat Lection angetrieben würden, wäre rathsam.” Philipp Jakob Spener, Pia Desideria, ed. Kurt Aland (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1964), 53, 55. See Andreas Deppermann, Johann Jakob Schütz und die Anfänge des Pietismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 65−66; and Ruth Albrecht, “Lay Appropriations and Female Interpretations of the Bible in German Pietism,” in Bible in Pietism and Evangelicalism, ed. Hoselton et al., 148−65.

  137. 137.

    Thomas Tillmann, Hermeneutik und Bibelexegese beim jungen Goethe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 21−22.

  138. 138.

    Philip Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria [1675], ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1964), 117.

  139. 139.

    Martin Schmidt, “Philip Jakob Spener und die Bibel,” in Pietismus und Bibel, ed. Kurt Aland, 19.

  140. 140.

    August Hermann Francke, Christus der Kern Heiliger Schrift. Oder, Einfältige Anweisung, Wie man Christum als den Kern der gantzen heil. Schrifft recht suchen, finden, schmäcken, und damit seine Seele nähren, sättigen, und zum ewigen Leben erhalten solle [1702], in August Hermann Francke: Schriften zur biblischen Hermeneutik I, ed. Erhard Peschke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), 208–339. See also Erhard Peschke, “August Hermann Francke und die Bibel,” in Pietismus und Bibel, 59−87; Markus Matthias, “Die Grundlegung der pietistischen Hermeneutik bei August Hermann Francke,” in Hermeneutik, Methodenlehre, Exegese. Zur Theorie der Interpretation in der Frühen Neuzeit, Günter Frank and Stephan Meier-Oeser, eds. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-holzboog, 2011), 189−202; and Constantin Plaul, “August Hermann Francke. Manuductio ad lectionem Scripturae Sacrae (1693) and Praelectiones Hermeneuticae (1717),” in Handbuch der Bibelhermeneutiken, ed. Oda Wischmeyer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 663−76.

  141. 141.

    Francke, Manuductio ad lectionem Scripturae Sacrae, in Schriften zur biblischen Hermeneutik I, ed. Peschke, 61–62, 72.

  142. 142.

    Francke, Manuductio, 62. “Requiritur animus ad theoreticam tantum & historicam, sed practicam & spiritualem cognitionem adspirans, ne sit lectio scripturæ, ut Aristotelis lectio, ubi contentus est, qui sensum, rationis naturalis, ope, intimius perspexit.”

  143. 143.

    Francke, Manuductio, 87−88.

  144. 144.

    Francke, Manuductio, 75–76.

  145. 145.

    Bruce Hindmarsh, “Lectio Evangelica: Figural Interpretation and Early Evangelical Bible Reading,” in Evangelicals and the Bible, ed. Larsen, 32−54; and Hindmarsh, “‘At any price give me the Book of God!’ Devotional Intent and Bible Reading for the Early Evangelicals,” in Bible in Pietism and Evangelicalism, ed. Hoselton et al., 223−41.

  146. 146.

    Nathan Cole, “Spiritual Travels,” in Roger Lundin and Mark A. Noll, eds., Voices from the Heart: Four Centuries of American Piety (Grand Rapids, MI: 1987), 84.

  147. 147.

    Anne Dutton, A Brief Account of the Gracious Dealings of God (London: J. Hart, 1750), 84−85.

  148. 148.

    Noll, In the Beginning Was the Word, 178.

  149. 149.

    As noted in the “Introduction,” this secularization trajectory is stressed to varying degrees in Frei, Eclipse; Harrison, Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science; Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible; Gregory, Unintended Reformation; Legaspi, Death of Scripture; and Lee, Erosion of Biblical Certainty.

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Hoselton, R.P. (2023). “Search the Scriptures; Search Your Experiences”: Reading the Bible Spiritually from the Reformation to Early Evangelicalism. In: Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44935-2_2

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