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This collection of essays showcases the variety and complexity of early awakened Protestant biblical interpretation and practice while highlighting the many parallels, networks, and exchanges that connected the Pietist and evangelical traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. A yearning to obtain from the Word spiritual knowledge of God that was at once experiential and practical lay at the heart of the Pietist and evangelical quest for true religion, and it significantly shaped the courses and legacies of these movements. The myriad ways in which Pietists and evangelicals read, preached, translated, and practiced the Bible were inextricable from how they fashioned new forms of devotion, founded institutions, engaged the early Enlightenment, and made sense of their world. This volume provides breadth and texture to the role of Scripture in these related religious traditions. The contributors probe an assortment of primary source material from various confessional, linguistic, national, and regional traditions and feature well-known figures-including August Hermann Francke, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards-alongside lesser-known lay believers, women, people of color, and so-called radicals and separatists. Pioneering and collaborative, this volume contributes fresh insight into the history of the Bible and the entangled religious cultures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Along with the editors, the contributors to this volume include Ruth Albrecht, Robert E. Brown, Crawford Gribben, Bruce Hindmarsh, Kenneth P. Minkema, Adriaan C. Neele, Benjamin M. Pietrenka, Isabel Rivers, Douglas H. Shantz, Peter Vogt, and Marilyn J. Westerkamp.

While there exists a robust scholarship on the cultural influences and public uses of the Bible in early American history, the historical development of biblical scholarship in America remains relatively understudied. The prevalent view suggests that biblical scholarship in America had its critical awakening with the importation of German Higher Criticism to northeastern divinity schools in the nineteenth century. This essay makes a corrective intervention by looking at Cotton Mather’s unpublished (1693–1728), the first comprehensive Bible commentary to be authored in British North America. More specifically, the essay examines Mather’s response to critical interrogation of the canon and the Biblia’s numerous revisions of King James translation in light of recent philological scholarship. What connects these two issues is that they both concern the “givenness” of the Bible, which, in Mather’s day, was being fundamentally challenged. Behind the discussions about the canonicity of diverse books and over how to render the Hebrew and Greek texts into modern languages always lurked fundamental questions regarding the divine authority, integrity, and perspicuity of the Bible. Examining a broad range of examples from across the Biblia, the essay demonstrates how Mather’s work defies clear-cut categorization as either precritical or critical. In response to the intellectual currents of the early Enlightenment, Mather pioneered a new type of deeply learned, historically conscious but apologetically-oriented biblical criticism in America. The clearly reflects the challenges brought on by the deepening historicization of Scripture and the destabilization of texts and meanings through a new type of criticism. More widely read in current European scholarship and in many ways more curious and daring than any other early American exegete, Mather joined the infinitely complex and open-ended quest for better translations. Moreover, he was the first in New England to seriously address hard questions about the canon of the Bible and its historical development. But he always did so with the aim of providing constructive answers to these debates that would ultimately shore up the authority of Scripture, stabilize the scriptural foundation for what Mather regarded as the core of Reformed orthodox theological beliefs, and offer improved interpretations of the biblical texts, which would lend themselves even better to devotion and illuminate for Christians, with the help of the most up-to-date scholarship, the full riches of God’s Word.

This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

This article addresses a pervasive historiographic assumption about the supremacy of the King James Bible in British North America by proposing that a process we call the “pluralization of Scriptures” forced colonial Protestants to square their belief in “the Bible” with the undeniable reality of many “bibles.” While the KJV remained dominant among anglophone Protestant populations, by the early eighteenth century some heirs of New England Puritanism were challenging its adequacy and pushing for improved translations of key passages, as members of the clerical intelligentsia became immersed in cutting-edge textual and historical scholarship. Also, during the eighteenth century, non-English cultures of biblicism with their own religious print markets formed in the middle colonies, most importantly among diasporic communities of German Protestants, who brought the Luther Bible to America, and diverse “heterodox” Bibles associated with radical Pietist groups. This essay contends that, well before the American Revolution, the advent of Higher Criticism in American seminaries, and the first wave of English-language Bible production in the early republic, Scripture had ceased to be a static, monolithic entity. A considerable number of alternative translations and commentary traditions in a variety of different languages came to co-exist and, at some points, also interact with each other. Moreover, we argue that competing translations, even of passages speaking to core Christian doctrines, were inextricably bound up with some of the most significant controversies among colonial Protestants, such as the debate over the doctrine of universal salvation, our main case study.

Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. _x000B_Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.

This essay compares two neglected German translations of Jonathan Edwards's famous Faithful Narrative (1737). Both were published in 1738 but by different circles of German Pietists—one Lutheran and centered around Halle, one Reformed and located in the Nether Rhine area. Both were more intimately woven into transatlantic evangelical communication networks than has been understood. Each version show that the news about the American awakening was received enthusiastically as an encouraging sign of God's advancing kingdom, a model for inner-churchly revivals, and an argument for the legitimacy of Pietist conventicles at home. Comparing the two translations also reveals how Edwards was appropriated in quite divergent ways and with varying attitudes by the two groups, reflecting their distinct regional, denominational and social contexts, as well as specific religious needs and dogmatic emphases. While both texts evince that German Pietism very much partook in the emergence of a transatlantic evangelical consciousness, they simultaneously show how the formation of such an ecumenical identity was complicated by persisting confessional and regional differences. Finally, the two German translations of Edwards's narrative illustrate that the meaning of these revivals as part of a larger Protestant evangelical awakening was negotiated not only among Anglo-American evangelicals but also among Continental Pietists.

This article examines Cotton Mather’s contribution to an emergent genre of early evangelical verse: scriptural poems and hymns. These compositions were scripture-derived, but they went artistically beyond poetic Psalm translations and line-by-line metrifications of biblical passages, which had been exclusively used in traditional Reformed worship. Scriptural poems and hymns first appeared in British Dissenting churches during the last third of the seventeenth century. As recent scholarship has shown, this genre of religious verse came into its own during eighteenth-century transatlantic revivals and constituted an important dimension of early evangelical culture. Mather’s compositions reveal him as a transitional figure in two eras of early evangelical poetry and hymnody. Looking back to the worship policy of his Puritan forebears, he remained committed to using only Psalms for public worship services, but he also promoted the singing of scriptural poems and hymns in the context of private gatherings. He even composed a number of original scriptural poems and hymns himself. Published in devotional tracts, these works resemble those of his English correspondent Isaac Watts. But they also reflect Mather’s experiential approach to the Bible (heavily influenced by his contacts with German Pietism) and his specific eschatological expectations for an imminent restitution of the spiritual gifts, inspiring Christian poets to compose new verse that would be appropriate for public worship. These expectations in some ways anticipate the connection between poetry and prophecy that would be articulated much later in American Romanticism.

This essay examines a basic tension arising from the spiritualistic tendency in how German Pietism and British evangelicalism engaged with the Bible. It will consider a wide range of examples from the early, formative phases of Pietism and colonial evangelicalism, focusing especially on August Hermann Francke, Johann Wilhelm and Johanna Eleonora Petersen, Heinrich Horche, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards, who were all in conversation with each other, directly or indirectly. Their discussions reveal a fine and highly contested line between reading with the Spirit and having quasi-revelatory experiences that were usually rooted in Scripture but transcended it. This dividing line

This essay intends to shed some light on the question of why ethnic supernatural fiction and Christian supernatural fiction have fared so differently among professional readers. It seeks to delineate ethnic and Christian supernatural fictions as literary genres, offer some necessary differentiations, and more clearly shows the strategies by which these bodies of literature represent the supernatural. Moreover, it wants to examine the deep similarities in the way these fictions are read by “ordinary,” non-professional readers, and why they are read, and what they do for people. For this purpose, this essay will briefly consider the respective histories of the literatures, and one paradigmatic text for each type of supernatural literature will be discussed in a little more detail. As an example of ethnic supernatural fiction, Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum will be examined, while William Paul Young’s 2008 bestseller The Shack will serve to illustrate the treatment of the supernatural in evangelical fiction.

Stievermann talks about the closing year of King George's war. In 1748, the closing year of King George's War, two tracts appealed to Pennsylvania's German-speaking population, addressing in particular those groups known by modern historians as the German Peace Churches. One tract was a translation of Plain Truth, in which Benjamin Franklin sought to advertise the reasonableness of his voluntary Association for Defense. The other tract, a direct rebuttal of Franklin's, was the product of Germantown printer and Radical Pietist Christoph Saur (1693-1758), who admonished his readers to follow Christ in disavowing any use of force, even when the escalating imperial contest between Britain and France would finally bring war to Pennsylvania. Here and elsewhere in the tract, Saur drew on the traditional discourse of nonresistant martyrdom, which would have been familiar to virtually all his pacifist readers from their devotional literature.