American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • American History >
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    • 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

TAYLOR, NATHANIEL WILLIAM

(23 June 1786, New Milford, CT- 10 March 1858, New Haven, Cn. Education: Graduated from Yale College, 1807; studied theology under Timothy Dwight·, New Haven, 1808-12. Career: Minister, First Congregational Church, New Haven, 1812-22; professor of didactic theology, Yale Divinity School, 1822-57.

The nineteenth century, it is generally agreed, was an age when the United States became increasingly optimistic and secular. The new age required a new theology, and Nathaniel William Taylor provided one-the New Haven Theology. Although Taylor claimed that he never really broke with the Westminster Confession, he stressed, as it did not, the role of personal effort in salvation.

Taylor marched into the new age, however, facing backwards. Although he rejected the idea of predestination, his free will was a circumscribed force which he called, in a famous phrase, "a power to the contrary." The world was still a place of sin, and man was born with an inclination towards evil. But, Taylor argued, man was a free moral creature who was depraved or virtuous according to his own choice. "Sin is in the sinning," said Taylor; it is a matter of actual behavior, not an inherent condition.

In a sense "Taylorism" was only the latest chapter in a process of modifying strict Calvinism. Puritans had first introduced the concept of human volition into their theology during the seventeenth century with the doctrine of preparation. But the New Haven Theology played an important role in strengthening Congregationalism during an age of revivalism and democratic reform. Taylor even accepted "self-love" as a desirable human quality. Ideally a preacher would appeal to man's desire for happiness, which would lead, in the regenerate, to a love of God.

Eloquent as both preacher and professor, Taylor provided a view of the religious life that his followers carried across the country in missions, revivals, and benevolent movements. Soon even the awakenings themselves were seen as the results of human effort rather than God's intervention.

Bibliography
A: Concio ad Clerum (New Haven, 1828); Essays on the Means of Regeneration (New Haven, 1829); Noah Porter, ed., Practical Sermons (New York, 1858); Essays ... upon Select Topics in Revealed Theology (New York, 1859); Lectures on the Moral Government of God, 2 vols. (New York. 1859).
B: DAB 18, 338-39; NCAB 7, 187; RHAP, 419-20; SH II, 285; Sidney E. Mead, Nathaniel William Taylor (Chicago, 1942).