“Nathanael Emmons, D. D. (1745 - 1840) The Last Puritan"

A paper presented to New England Reformed Fellowship Bolton, MA November 12, 1991

            What exactly was it that happened  to the Calvinist - and Puritan - heritage of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay colony?  The colonial development of Puritanism is well documented.  The later Nineteenth Century revivalistic fervor has also been subjected to thorough surveys.  But there is considerable ignorance about the gap between Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson, between the Great Awakening of the 1740's and the Revival of 1859, between William Tennant and Dwight L. Moody.  How did the great edifice of colonial Puritan faith and life collapse into the later anarchic theological scene that typified New England in the Nineteenth Century with its Millerism, its Transcendentalism, its Christian Science?

            The question is not of merely academic interest to a pastor struggling to revive Reformed and Calvinist thinking into a secular atmosphere which could be described - with upper New York state - in those familiar words "the burnt over district".  In seeking to understand what happened in that bridge period - between 1774 and 1819 - one might perhaps discover some of the causes and thus provide some of the cures for our contemporary malaise in New England.

            In this searching for the causes of the end of Puritanism I came across Nathanael Emmons.  Emmons has frequently been described as "the last Puritan". Like many of the New England Puritan clergy he lived to a ripe old age: Solomon Stoddard, grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, lived to eighty-six; Increase Mather to eighty-four.¹  His span of years and ministry was even more impressive. He lived (in a day when life expectancy averaged thirty-two years for males) for ninety-five years.  He was born before the French and Indian Wars, and lived until the shadows of the Civil War were beginning to gather. 

            His roots were solidly New England colonial and Puritan.  Born in East Haddam, Connecticut, in 1745, graduating from Yale in 1767, he was a product of the final flowering of colonial New England piety. His ministry in Franklin lasted for fifty-four years - from 1773 to 1827.  And for the last thirteen of his life he continued physically active and mentally alert, right down to his 95th year. His three wives all were connected to some of the most distinguished clergy families in New England. His wide friendships included men as diverse as Dr. Samuel Spring of Newburyport and Governor John Treadwell of Connecticut. At the end of his life he would speak of dangling Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, on his knee as a child.  In his old age he served as a link to pre-revolutionary, colonial, puritanism. His lifetime spanned decisive events not only in the formation and development of the United States, but also anticipated causes he made his own such as anti-slavery, states rights, and the opening of the frontier.

            In the old Franklin Burying Ground you will see his stone with the inscription "The truths of the gospel and the duties of his sacred calling, were his delight. He meditated on these things, gave himself wholly to them and his profiting appeared to all."  Four generations of Franklin residents had received his ministry: the simple shaft of granite, seventeen feet high, enclosed with an iron railing, bears the simple inscription "N. Emmons, D. D. Aged 96." One wonders how much any of those observing these pious relics know of the man himself, or care about the faith that motivated his ministerial labors.

            "A more specific study of Emmons' thought and influence is surely in order"²  It has been twenty years since Harold Vanderpool, in a Ph. D. thesis at Harvard Divinity School, made that observation.  Since then Emmons' name has occasionally surfaced, particularly in the wake of studies about Jonathan Edwards and his theological and intellectual progeny.

            Allen Guelzo, professor at the Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia, speaks of the "transmission" of the influence of Jonathan Edwards through his son and grandson, Jonathan, Jr. (1745-1801), and Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), through Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790) and Nathaniel Taylor (1786-1858). That school was variously described: "The New Divinity" or "The New England Theology" or named after Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803). It concluded with Edwards Amasa Park (1808-1900).  Guelzo goes so far as to call "the real legacy of Jonathan Edwards" the semi-Pelagianism of Charles Finney, the evangelist.

            The very thought makes John Gerstner apoplectic.  In his The Rational Theology of Jonathan Edwards, published earlier this year, Gerstner stoutly defends Edwards against what he regards as Guelzo's calumnies. In his final chapter of what is scheduled to be the first of three volumes, titled "The Historical Influence of Edwards' Ministry", he comments on the influence of Edwards' "rational preaching". Noting that Hopkins, Emmons and Bellamy had a similar appetite for such a homiletical method, he cites Emmon as "a particularly good example of this, as easily seen in his six volumes of published sermons"³

            Gerstner is quick to deny any ideological connection between Emmons and Edwards.  "He does not hesitate to think of God as the author of sin." In his denial of original sin and his placing the emphasis on present actions, Emmons' theology becomes a travesty of Calvinism. "That this is antithetical to Jonathan Edwards is obvious," Gerstner concludes.⁴

            Gerstner is not alone.  In the recent Wheaton symposium on Edwards collected under the title Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, in the section "The Legacy of Edwards", James Hoopes takes a similar position, though with less emotion.  In that article Emmons' name also appears, though with little respect. "Among the few scholars now interested in Emmons it is customary to assert that his metaphysics resembled Edward's.  But the statement cannot stand.  Emmons never offered any speculative system, substantial or ideal, remotely comparable in sophistication to Edwards's articulation of the view that the universe is ideal and constituted in the consciousness of God."⁵

            A slightly different tack was taken at the same symposium by the host, Mark Noll. In his paper "Jonathan Edwards and Nineteenth-Century Theology" Noll notes that three distinct movements claimed the mantle of Jonathan Edwards: the New Divinity, the "New Haven" theology coming from Yale College, and the Presbyterian "Old School" theology of Princeton Seminary.  Noll is more impressed by Emmons, linking him with Hopkins and Taylor as "bold and original thinkers who likewise wished to be known as Calvinists while calling no man father"⁶.

            Systematic theologian David Wells of Gordon Conwell Seminary has taken the argument a stage further than these church historians. Reflecting on the theological change that took place in New England at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, he has recently stated "New England theology" has to be taken as a significant factor in the collapse of Calvinism as an intellectual, theological and moral force in New England.  Citing the influence of Nathaniel Taylor, and his attempt to combine Calvinism with Nineteenth Century revivalism, he claims that "Taylor succeeded in opening the door to theological views that would soon spread far and wide and be the ruin of evangelical faith, Reformed and Arminian.  Taylor was the stepping stone to the next generation's Liberalism ...".⁷

            As B. B. Warfield noted, the line through Hopkins, Taylor and finally to Edwards Amasa Park (1808 - 1900), the last of the propagators of the New England Theology has to include Emmons.  Park - whose father Calvin named him Edwards! - was Emmons' great biographer.  Warfield writes: "Park was of that line of theological descent which came through Hopkins, Emmons and Woods; but he sought to incorporate into his system all that seemed to him to be the results of New England thinking for the century which preceded him, not excepting the extreme positions of Taylor himself."⁸

            Edwards Park was adamant: when he spoke of Nathanael Emmons he maintained that "He has suggested the only feasible Method of defending Calvinism"⁹.  He defends his premise: "The writings of Emmons are signally useful as a testimony that, in the judgment of one who stood on a clearer mount of vision than the majority of his race have reached, the sternest principles of Calvinism cannot be sustained except on the basis of the truths, that God never requires men to do what he cannot do himself, i. e. work an impossibility; and that he never punishes men except for what they have done.  To denounce these truths as inconsistent with Calvinism when they are logically and ethically essential to it, is to stigmatize one of the strongest advocates of Calvinism as ignorant of its very spirit.  The influence of Emmons will no sooner be counteracted by such denunciations, than a rock in the sea will be overborne by the froth and fury of the waves."¹⁰

            Was Emmons really "the last Puritan"?  Was he what he always claimed to be: "a consistent Calvinist"?  Were the causes for the subsequent self-destruction of New England Puritanism and Calvinist Trinitarian Congregationalism to be found incipient in his thought and influence?  These are questions that must be answered for Nathanael Emmons can help us understand what happened in the century and a half between Jonathan Edwards and Edwards Park.  He was, in spite of his denigrators, a man to be reckoned with.  His influence was widespread.  As a theological instructor he trained over a hundred men to go into the ministry. The theological curriculum he developed became the basis of the curriculum at the foundation of Andover Seminary. The first four theological professors at Bangor Seminary, including the redoubtable Enoch Pound, were all his students and fell under his influence.

            When Archibald Alexander came to New England on that famous visit of 1801 he was taken by his guide, Mr. Coffin, to see Dr. Emmons.  "I had no doubt", he records, "that he had a design in taking me to this venerable theologian, believing that by his conversation I should be brought over, for I was already quite a follower of Edwards.  Nor had I the least objection to receive light from any quarter."¹¹  So he made his way through country "better cultivated than any I had yet seen in New England, and Dr. Emmons occupied a large and commodious farm-house very near to his church."¹²  Alas for Mr. Coffin Emmons proved "rather taciturn" and "during the visit he never attempted to enter into any controversy, but seemed rather to avoid all doctrinal discussion"¹³  The biographer concludes: In "the frequent mention which Dr. Alexander was accustomed to make of this visit, he always spoke of him (i.e. Emmons) in high terms of respect; while he entertained very different theological opinions."¹⁴

            At the turn of the Nineteenth Century: an incipient confrontation between Princeton and Andover!  Between Old School and New School.  Between the New Divinity and the old Presbyterianism.  1801 was the year of the Plan of Union, one of the last activities of Jonathan Edwards, Jr.  In fifty years' time, in that famous debate between Charles Hodge and Park, what Mark Noll describes¹⁵ as "the overly precise scruples and overly sharp scalpels" of the two men would exhibit the weaknesses of the two schools with "telling force".  Hodge would say that one cannot "truth in feelings and error in intellect at the same time" and Park that one cannot categorize the Christian faith in neat dogmatic logic.  In just over a hundred years B. B. Warfield's analysis of New England theology would "lack the fire of Hodge's polemics".  Why? To Noll the answer is obvious: "with Calvinism of any variety at a premium in New England, Park's mediating position now had much to recommend it"¹⁶. 

            More than that: what Warfield could not realize but we now know, Princeton theology would itself capitulate within two decades.  The two institutions established to defend traditional Calvinism, founded a year apart (1808 and 1809), would neither defend orthodoxy.  The collapse of American Calvinism's intellectual base would be complete. New England Calvinists a hundred years later still feel the impact of that debate. We seek to understand our forebears gave up their Puritan heritage so easily.

            Emmons, the "last Puritan", the self-styled "consistent Calvinist", might helps us understand our predicament and learn from the past.  A quick, initial, survey of his career follows under four headings.

I. EMMONS THE PREACHER

            "Franklin must be the centre of my world, and my study must be the centre of Franklin."¹⁷  Nathanael Emmons' motto is fundamental of our understanding of the fifty four years of his labors as parish minister.  Franklin was a small village in Eastern Massachusetts. His biographer notes that during that time "he has contributed to raise the dignity of a parish, and to show that, through a secluded people, a minister may transmit a power over an entire land.  He has helped to exalt the character of sermons; for he has made them the repository of a profound theological system."¹⁸ 

            During his lifetime Nathanael Emmons preached six thousand times!  In an "Aid To Young Ministers", written towards the end of his active ministry (around 1820), he recalled his commitment when he was called to the Franklin Church in 1773, six years out of Yale College, and a young man of 27:

"I resolved, upon my first entrance upon the pastoral office, to make preaching my principal object.  It had appeared to me that many ministers, as soon as they had obtained a parish, began to be more inattentive to their public performances, especially to their preaching; and took less and less pains in preparing their public discourses.  Such a practice, I thought, betrayed both want of wisdom and want of faithfulness.  To avoid this error, I determined to take time for the preparation of my sermons, and endeavor to preach better from Sabbath to Sabbath, and from year to year.  I was convinced by experience as well as observation, that I could not long remain stationary, but must necessarily decline, if I did not improve in preaching.  I farther reflected that my people would naturally and justly expect me to improve in my public performances, and that with all my exertions it would be difficult to keep up with their expectations.  Under these impressions I resolved to take and appropriate sufficient time to prepare for the Sabbath."¹⁹

            True to his Edwardsean heritage he further explains: "I always aimed to impress the conscience, as well as enlighten the understanding, of my hearers."²⁰  His preaching - as was Jonathan Edwards' - was often described with the adjective metaphysical. Norman Fiering has pointed out in "The Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards's Metaphysics"²¹ that the basis of that metaphysic was a strong Lockean rationalism.  While the story of Edwards' discovery of Locke's On Human Understanding at the age of 12 when he entered Yale, may or may not be apocryphal, one sees the long shadow of Locke on both Edwards and Emmons.

            "A large part of (Emmons') energy was poured into rational activity,"  Harold Vanderpool states in his thesis.  His preaching - forty two examples of which are to be found in the posthumously published Sermons On Various Subjects Of Christian Doctrine and Duty²², contains many examples of that rationalism.  "Like all devoted Calvinists, he talked about the action of God in regeneration and about one's experience in conversion, but at the center of his soul was reason."²³  He would state categorically that "there are but two real mysteries in the Gospel, and these are the doctrine of the blessed Trinity and the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ." "There are no other doctrines which are mysterious and incomprehensible by mankind."²⁴

            His preaching then addressed itself to reason.  Like his Systematic Theology it began with the premise of "The Right of Private Judgement in Religion".  It presented its material in consistent and logical sequence.  As his biographer states, in his preaching "He aimed to be perspicuous", arranging his ideas in a luminous order.  But he can also admit that "He was not, in all senses and in all relations of the term, a plain preacher"²⁵ 

            Nor in spite of all his protestations - and that of his biographer - was he a Biblical preacher in the sense of wrestling with the Scripture and expounding the text.  While he quotes verses there seems little of the Puritan commitment to take the text seriously. His knowledge of Greek was limited, his understanding of Hebrew nonexistent.

            He was full of pithy sayings about preaching which he communicated to his pupils: "Let your sermons, like a sugar loaf, begin at a point, and widen and expand to the end."  Or again, "Let your eloquence flow from your heart to your hands, and never attempt to force it the other way."²⁶  And, as if to warn about long sermons he would add: "Be short in all religious exercises.  Better leave the people longing than loathing."  "There are no conversions after the hour is out."  "He who preaches less than half an hour, had better never have gone into the pulpit; he who preaches more, had better never have come out of it."²⁷

            Obviously Emmons had considerable ability to attract and improve his hearers.  one professor commented after hearing him: "I felt an emotion of the moral sublime, when I saw one old man after another, who had grown gray under the patriarch's ministrations, bending forward in breathless silence, rising at length from their seats, and gazing with eagerness to catch every word that fell from the lips of their teacher."²⁸

            But his conviction that "theism could be proved by argument" meant that his Systematic Theology - and his preaching - began with reason and natural revelation and only then dealt, as chapter two, with scripture and special revelation.  As Vanderpool observes "It was momentous for Andover that Emmons' format was originally used at the seminary under the instruction of Leonard Woods."²⁹  His rationalism, his development from Edwards of his own style of metaphysical preaching, meant ultimately the denial of Calvinism, the semi-Pelagianism of Taylor and - both in reaction and in lineal succession -the sensationalism of Finney and the other revivalists.  The preaching of the early Puritans had now, with this "last Puritan", gone to seed.

II. EMMONS THE PASTOR

            Emmons' philosophy of pastoral care was clear.  It is summarized: "By the experiments which he had made on the subject (of pastoral visitation) Dr. Emmons was led to conclude that it would be a great economy of time to see his people at his own house."³⁰  Or, as a missionary visiting him once observed: "Though I admit that pastoral visits are important, and may with propriety occupy a proportion of most ministers' time, yet I do think that the man who can write as Dr. Emmons does, ought not to be diverted from his studies by these things."³¹

            The Franklin Church enjoyed revival three times during his fifty-four years of ministry - 1784, 1794 and 1809.  During that time he would say that he would converse with his people anywhere.  Sometimes, during these revivals, he would ask the congregation if they were interested in having a conversation with him to remain behind, and more than half would stay.  But that was the exception: he generally "chose to see (parishioners) in his study, rather than at their homes."³²

            Emmons disdained physical or manual labor.  He was grateful for a study on the lower floor, commenting "I have saved months of time."  He was a man of books, and - as Archibald Alexander discovered - taciturn to the point of withdrawal.  His ministry was respected in Franklin, but one has the impression that people were not close to him.  None of the Puritan image of the minister as visitor, catechizer of the young in the homes, seems to have been a mark of his ministry.

            In his The Faithful Shepherd, Dennis Hall has pointed our that a subtle change came between the first and second generation of Puritan clergy.  As the second generation studied at Harvard, "Harvard taught them to behave as faithful shepherds.  But in subtle ways Harvard drained this ideal of the fervor needed to sustain it."³³  We note an even further decline and by the time of the last Puritan, Emmons reminds us that the ideal has almost disappeared.  The Reformed Pastor who covered all the homes of Kidderminster, has become, four generations after Baxter, a stay-at-home academic, whose main concern is not the parish but the pulpit, and who gives credence to some of the Nineteenth Century caricatures of clergy as austere, removed, and donnish.

III. EMMONS THE TEACHER       

            Emmons was particularly remarkable in his career as a theological tutor.  It was here that his influence spread and multiplied.  At the end of his life he had difficulty remembering how many he had trained.  He could name eighty-six or eighty-seven, but it is thought that the number actually exceeded a hundred³⁴.

            They came to the Franklin parsonage, usually after graduating from college, for a year of training.  They had various levels of ability: the student who resided with him on the occasion of Archibald Alexander's visit was regarded as "very stupid".  Archibald described that student's as being to complete two discourses for Sunday, and then he would read these to Emmons as his tutor.  Alexander observed as he asked Emmons the question, "If man is dependent on God for every thing, including all thoughts and feelings, and if the law of God requires him to be holy, while his thoughts are sinful, then does not God require the creature to be independent?"³⁵

            Emmons treated each theological student as a member of the family.  From the early days of his ministry - from 1778 on - they made their way to his home, and at that early stage, having lost two children and a wife, he was very much in a solitary condition.  His list of books that they were expected to read shows a range of literature, but all of it Eighteenth Century.  It brings together both Unitarian and Trinitarian.  It consists of many New England divines, but few of the original Puritans.  It shows a predilection for philosophy - Hume being one book cited for the being and perfection of God.  There is little of the more solid English divines, except for Hooker.  Perkins, Owen, Flavel, Goodwin, Sibbes - particularly Calvin - even the great New England Puritan writer Thomas Shephard - are conspicuous by their absence³⁶.  It is a strangely confined, and rapidly closing in, intellectual landscape.

            His influence was explained by Enoch Pond of Bangor: "Dr. Emmons had a peculiar faculty of attaching his students to himself personally.  They not only revered and honored him, but they loved him.  He had also the faculty of imbuing them with his own peculiar sentiments, and of working out of them everything of an opposite tendency.  Of all the young men whom he instructed in theology, very few left him without becoming pretty thorough Hopkinsians.  And all this was accomplished without any artifice, or any force put upon their opinions, except the force of his invincible logic."

            He continues: "They tried to make sermons after his model; and it was chiefly through an influence of this sort, that his peculiar, topical mode of constructing sermons prevailed so extensively in New England for more than half a century."

            Certainly his influence was pervasive.  It included not only teachers and eminent divines, but many missionaries.  Emmons' contention was that Hopkinsianism lent itself to missionary enterprise in a way that the old Calvinism did not.  With his emphasis on human ability he became a leader in the foundation of the Massachusetts Missionary Society, and was its president for twelve years.  He also edited the Massachusetts Missionary Magazine.

            One of his more curious links was through a pupil by the name of Herman Daggett.  Daggett was the Principal of the Mission School at Cornwall, Connecticut.  There - in the years between 1818 and 1832, there came natives of Sumatra, China, Bengal, Hindustan, Mexico, New Zealand, islands of the South Seas, Greece and the Azores.  Many native Americans also attended.   It is said that Emmons' influence spread through the publication of his Systematic Theology and that both Samuel John Mills, Jr., and Adoniram Judson carried some copies of it when they set out for missionary endeavor in Africa and in Burma.

            It is curious that it is possible to ignore Emmons and his decisive influence on the course of New England theology in the interim years.  While he distrust Harvard, and would not send any students there, he developed close links with Williams - a center of missionary enthusiasm - and Brown.  He later, as has been stated, affected Bangor and Andover Seminaries, setting his stamp on them, while continuing to train men for the ministry in his home in Franklin.

IV. EMMONS THE THEOLOGIAN

            In his biography, Park describes Emmons "As he was at last, so he was at first, a doctrinal preacher".  The priority of preaching meant for him a priority for doctrinal preaching.  At the age of twenty-five, contemplating a call it was said of him: "And withal, settlement or no settlement, he would preach the truths of Calvinism, distasteful as he knew they were to the majority of men."³⁷

            But his teaching differed radically from the traditional Calvinism of his forebears.  Significant in shaping the man, reflecting itself in his teaching of theological students, were three major formulations, each of them linking him in natural progression from Puritanism to the theological innovations of the Nineteenth Century.

(a) The Imputation of Adam's Sin, Human Sinfulness, and Individual Freedom:

            When Emmons was taken on trials for license to preach the gospel at New Britain he was asked about the apostasy of Adam.  What had the First Man lost?  "A good temper of heart," was his response.  "Did the apostasy affect his understanding?" "No," he replied.

He was asked about regeneration: "Does it effect the understanding as well as the will?" "No," he replied: "the heart or will was only renewed by the Spirit of God."

            The records of the South Association of Hartford County contain a protest by one of the clergy there present.  Rev. Edward Eels stated in that document as his reason for voting against the ordination of Nathanael Emmons: "In licensing candidates, we act for the churches, and they depend upon our licensing them upon the known faith of the churches; and it is apparent upon examination, Mr. Emmons is not of the same faith, in some of the important doctrines of religion, we settled our churches upon; and therefore we ought to consult our churches before we license candidates upon a different faith.  But nothing I could say by way of argument and persuasion, availed any thing."³⁸

            Jonathan Edwards had held what has been called³⁹ "Stapfer's scheme of the mediate imputation of Adam's sin".  Warfield said that he taught immediate imputation in the vocabulary of mediate imputation⁴⁰. It has also been noted⁴¹ that in his treatise Original Sin "Edwards was not able to defend the doctrine of original sin with the same apparent ease as he did moral determinism ... the published logic of determinism by which he hemmed in human action in Freedom of Will led straight back to God as the author of sin".

            Emmons has been accused often of making God the author of sin⁴².  For him original sin was not transmitted to the rest of the human race by the imputation of Adam;s sin, but rather in the individual sinner's "exercises".  Therefore the proximate cause of sinning must be God who "produces those moral exercises in their hearts, in which moral depravity properly and essentially consists"⁴³

            In analyzing his system Frank Hugh Foster noted that Emmons ultimately destroyed human freedom.  "There is" - according to Emmons' theology - "no true efficient agency in man. God determines what man shall do, presents motives to him, and excites him to act in view of them.  Man's freedom must therefore consist in something different from God's since God originates and man does not.  No amount of assertion and no appeals to consciousness can break the force of these assertions, which are Emmons' own."⁴⁴

            Since Emmons believed that all sin and holiness consist in choosing, arguing forcibly for human freedom in spite of the contradictions of his system, he held that the human heart is capable of exercises.  Hence his famous - or infamous - "exercise scheme" in which the human heart could "exercise such new and holy affections (that) they necessarily feel their obligation to make them a new heart and a new spirit and to obey every divine command."⁴⁵

            It is obviously just a further step to the Pelagianizing tendencies of Nathaniel Taylor and the evangelistic methodology of Charles Finney.  As Asa Rand (1783-1871) tried to point out in his attack on Finney was that the evangelist was an Arminian and his "theories did not agree with any of the systems of New England theology", among those he cited was Emmons⁴⁶.  "There were some other point of doctrine upon which he dwelt in a critical manner, such, for example, as my views of the voluntary nature of moral depravity, and the sinner's activity in regeneration"⁴⁷.  What Asa Rand failed to recognize is the indebtedness Finney owed for his heterodoxy to that progression from Jonathan Edwards to Nathanael Emmons to Nathaniel Taylor.

            Subsequent Nineteenth Century revivalism and Twentieth Century fundamentalist evangelism therefore have direct lineage and contributed directly, through their concept of mediate imputation, to a different evangelism and indeed a different theology.

(b) The Atonement As Imputation of Christ's Righteousness:

            With the denial of the imputation of Adam's sin at his licensure trials, Emmons' view of the work of Christ as "federal head" in the old New England Puritan concept of headship was also jettisoned.  His view of the atonement was essentially governmental, and owed much to Grotius.

            His best known statement about the atonement is as follows:

"Though Christ suffered, the just for the unjust, though he made his soul an offering for sin, and though he suffered most excruciating pains in the garden and on the cross, yet he did not lay God under the least obligation, in point of justice, to pardon and save a single sinner ... By obeying and suffering in the room of sinners, he only rendered it consistent for God to renew or not renew, to pardon or not to pardon, to reward or not to reward, sinners; but did not lay him under the least obligation, in point of justice, to do either of these things for them."⁴⁸

            He continues:

"The righteousness of Christ, like that of every other holy being, consists entirely in his love to God and other beings ... Is it even possible that the actions which Christ performed while here on earth, in which his righteousness in part consists, should be so transferred from him to believers as to become actions which they have performed?"

            He has gone full circle. Jonathan Edwards "gave little attention to the federal theory, a fact which probably indicates that he doubted that it significantly safeguarded the principle of direct participation."⁴⁹  As Guelzo points out his mediate view of the imputation of Adam's sin meant that any connection between Christ and ourselves as our federal representative.  Emmons develops the point one stage further: "It has been considered as a great difficulty to reconcile free pardon with full satisfaction to divine justice.  The difficulty has arisen from a supposition that the atonement of Christ was designed to pay the debt of suffering which sinners owed to God."⁵⁰

            "Did Christ bear the legal penalty which was due to us?"  Park poses the question.  Many Calvinists, he notes would say "Yes."  "No" was the reply of Emmons.  "Distributive justice forbids that it be borne the second time."  "Are our sins literally imputed to Christ?"  "Yes," he continues.  "No," was the answer of Emmons.  "Distributive justice forbids that they be imputed to us also."  "Has Christ rescued us from the guilt of sin?"  "Yes," responds the Calvinist. "No," says Emmons.  "After we have been rescued from guilt we do not deserve to be punished."

            The governmental view of the atonement and the moral influence theory with which it is closely allied, anticipates the later liberalizing tendencies of a Lyman Beecher, of a Horace Bushnell.  We find Emmons' protestations about the cross being at the heart of his message disingenuous: the reality is that the merits of Christ's shed blood do not directly impinge on my own forgiveness.  I was not there when they crucified my Lord.  The concept of substitutionary atonement, so much a horror to later Congregationalists, is essentially and implicitly denied in Emmons' governmental view of the atonement.

(c) His Christology:

            Observers have marvelled at the rapid ascendancy of Unitarianism in New England congregationalism.  It took only fourteen years for Unitarianism to go from being quietly subversive to openly schismatic: 1805 was the year Henry Ware was appointed Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, 1819 when William Ellery Channing's sermon in Baltimore precipitated the final break. The Unitarian cause decimated the number of orthodox Trinitarian congregational societies in New England and particularly in the Boston area.

            Frank Hugh Foster⁵¹ makes two interesting comments on Emmons' influence in preparing the soil for the rise of Unitarianism in Massachusetts.  Through the number of his students he exercised a considerable influence on the theology of those clergy who had to respond to the new thinking.  Stoutly orthodox and Trinitarian himself, there was something defective in his Trinitarian affirmation and his Christology that prepared the way for the new heresy and made the New England scene a fertile place for it to grow.

            In his sermons on the Trinity he states⁵²:-

"The Scripture represents the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as distinctly possessed of personal properties.  The Father is represented as being able to understand, to will, and to act of himself. The Son is represented as being able to understand, to will, and to act of himself.  And the Holy Ghost is represented as being able to understand, to will, and to act of himself.  According to these representations, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three distinct persons or agents."

            Foster notes that he spoke of "society" in the Godhead, of the different persons in the deity having made "a covenant of redemption", and - most significantly that the three in one is not a single person, but in one being.  Foster concludes: "This is a denial of the uni-personality of God.  In a word, almost all the phrases to which Channing objects are to be found in Emmons".⁵³

            The second failure of Emmons to protect New England congregationalism from the onslaught of unitarianism was his defective Christology.  The charge is made that Emmons' "Christology was equally incapable of preventing such a movement as the Unitarian from arising, and of meeting it when it had arisen; for it had no helpful word to justify the doctrine of the personal union of the two natures."  Emmons wrestles with the concept of Christ's two natures and finally throws his hands up in despair:

"The question still recurs, what is meant by Christ's being one person in two natures?  I answer, the man Jesus, who had a true body and a reasonable soul, was united with the second person in the Trinity ... If any should here ask, how could his two natures be thus personally united?  We can only say, it is a mystery."⁵⁴

Foster notes that the italicized word suggest that Emmons was essentially Nestorian.⁵⁵

            William Ellery Channing, growing up in Newport, Rhode Island, knowing Samuel Hopkins and his system well, and knowing at first hand the influence of Emmons, was able to make the weakness of the system fair game.  The founder of Unitarianism in New England could with justice make his complaints about the Trinitarianism he was taught. "We object to the doctrine of the Trinity that, whilst acknowledging in words, it subverts the unity of God,"⁵⁶ and again that "According to this doctrine, Jesus Christ, instead of being one mind, one conscious, intelligent principle, whom we can understand, consists of two souls, two minds; the one divine, the other human; the one weak, the other almighty; the one ignorant the other omniscient. Now we maintain that this is to make Christ two beings."

            The key difficulty with Emmons' affirmation of Trinitarianism was his rationalism.  The formulation lacked Biblical moorings and seemed to rest more confidently in logical formulation.  He further betrayed a lack of grasp of historical theology: his unawareness of the great Trinitarian creeds was surprising.  Further, given some of his sources in Eighteenth Century English nonconformist theology there was a general lessening of orthodox Trinitarian teaching. Puritanism had become Socinian after three generations, culminating in the capitulation of English Presbyterian to Unitarianism at the Salter's Hall Convention in 1719.  The defection of New England Puritanism was predictable but Emmons' contribution as theologian, teacher and influential churchman was also a factor.

            Emmons' death in 1840 was the passing of an era.  One of the fifth and final generation of New England colonial ministers⁵⁷, he saw during his fifty four years of ministry in Franklin, Massachusetts, tumultuous changes on the ecclesiastic scene.  In the transition of New England Calvinism during that period he was a prime mover.  The rise of the New England theology, the inheritance of Jonathan Edwards, its adaptation by Samuel Hopkins, the shaping of a new post-colonial clergy, the rise of the missionary movement, and the defection of Unitarian societies: all these owe some of their momentum to the minister whose entire service was spent in a remote New England village, twenty-eight miles from Boston.

            It was left to Charles Hodge ten years later to provide the obituary to Emmons' life, work and theology. Against the "consistent Calvinism" of Emmons and Park he pictures the struggle as the blows of an axe against the traditional Calvinism of Princeton with its insistence "That a sentence of condemnation passed on all men for the sin of one man; that men are by nature the children of wrath; that without Christ we can do nothing; that he hath redeemed us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us; that men are not merely pardoned by justified."  And he concludes: "however keen may be the edge or bright the polish of that weapon, it has so little substance, it must be shivered into atoms with the first blow it strikes against those sturdy trees which have stood for ages."

            The axe may not have felled the tree but it left a wasteland. In New England today only the sturdiest shoots from the stump of a once proud Puritanism survive. Emmons was not only correctly designated "the last Puritan".  He had unwittingly contributed to making his title a reality.