American Realities with Bill Youngs
  • Home Page
  • About Me
    • Brief Résumé
    • Illustrative Films
  • Summary
  • Workshop
    • Jobs for Historians
    • Maps
    • Slideshows
  • Images
    • A Walk Through Turnbull
  • Fireside Talks
    • American History >
      • Indigenous Alaska: The Baidarka
    • National Parks
  • Spoken Word
  • Books
    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

BELLAMY, JOSEPH

Picture
(20 February 1719, Cheshire, CT-6 March 1790, Bethlehem, CT). Education: B.A., Yale College, 1735; studied theology with Jonathan Edwards*, 1735-37. Career: Minister, Bethlehem, CT, 1738-90. 

Joseph Bellamy has been called "the most undeviating of Jonathan Edwards's disciples," which suggests both Bellamy's debt to Edwards and the difficulty of maintaining the ideas of Calvin and Edwards in the Age of Enlightenment. Bellamy did "deviate," and his innovations are as significant as his underlying loyalty to Calvinism. 

One of the brightest young men of his age, Bellamy graduated from Yale at age sixteen, studied under Edwards in Northampton for two years, and was licensed to preach when he was eighteen. He was much in demand as an itinerant preacher during the early years of the Awakening and traveled throughout New "England. But he spent most of his half century in the ministry in his small parish of Bethlehem. There he was surrounded by many students, including some fifty who became ministers, and a number of lay men and women, including Edwards's later-to-be notorious grandson, Aaron Burr. 

In some respects a conservative, Bellamy insisted on the importance of grace for redemption and demanded that full church membership be limited to the visible saints. He called the Half Way Covenant, “an external graceless covenant." But despite such signs of loyalty to tradition, Bellamy is known for several influential innovations in Congregational thought. In particular, he emphasized God's "moral government." Bellamy said that God, the universal lawgiver, had established a system of rules to guide and ennoble humanity. He did not create sin, but permitted it-the actual sin was in the doing of wrong, and the fault vas humanity's. God might have created a universe without sin, but that would lave been a world without glory. The universe, Bellamy argued, was "more holy and happy than if sin and misery had never entered" Similarly, the meaning of Christ's life was not in his sacrificial atonement to an angry God, but in his embodiment of God's love. 

Although Bellamy justified "the wisdom of God in the permission of sin" in several respects he softened the rigor of traditional Calvinism. His New Divinity included the possibility of universal redemption. Sin, according to Bellamy, was not a well-neigh insurmountable debt occasioned by Adam's fall, but a series of daily failures, subject to reform. In such ways Bellamy can be reedited with keeping alive basic Calvinist categories, such as sin and grace, while explaining them in a way that appealed to a world that was increasingly inclined to think well of humankind. 

Bibliography 
A: True Religion Delineated (Boston, 1750); Four Sermons (Boston, 1758); A Dialogue on the Christian Sacraments (Boston, 1762); The Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin, Vindicated (Boston, 1769); A Careful and Strict Examination of the External Covenant (New Haven, 1770); Works, 2 vols. (Boston, 1850). 
B: AAP 1,404-12; DAB 2, 165; DARB, 42-43; NCAB 7,78; RHAP, 406-7; SH 2, 33-34.