Topographies of Difference: Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and the Uneven Theological Development of Late-Puritan New England
Abstract
Topographies of Difference: Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and the Uneven Theological Development of Late-Puritan New England reassesses the role of space, geography, and the “wilderness” trope of Puritan sermon literature in the development of the eighteenth century “New Divinity” movement (sometimes also called “Consistent Calvinism” or “Hopkinsianism”). Twentieth and early twenty-first century New Divinity historiography has often described Bellamy and Hopkins’s theological commitments as a pastiche of both liberal Reformed and reactionary Calvinist doctrines. Against this view, Topographies of Difference argues that the New Divinity’s theological and cultural polemics are in fact reflective of Bellamy and Hopkins’s fidelity to a single intellectual norm—to wit, their characteristically Edwardsean emphasis upon the logic of difference (i.e., the thought of difference in itself, or as such). Through a sustained exploration of the role played by difference (variously set in terms of spatial difference, symbolic difference, representational difference, and racial difference) in the interpellation of individual subjects, Bellamy and Hopkins’s elaborate anti-Arminian polemics are read as an anti-bourgeois critique of the universal, rational subject of Enlightenment liberalism, which the New Divinity understood as a threat to the concept of (divinely elected) soteriological difference.
Subject Area
Theology|History|Philosophy of religion
Recommended Citation
Gleim, John, "Topographies of Difference: Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and the Uneven Theological Development of Late-Puritan New England" (2020). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI28090989.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI28090989
