Charles Chauncy (1705-1787)

Sources

Liberal congregationalist

Bosto n Roots. Charles Chauncy spent most of his life in Boston, becoming a leader of the liberal wing of New England Congregationalism from his post as pastor of the city’s leading church. He was born on 1 January 1705 into a prominent family, the son of a leading merchant and great-grandson of the second president of Harvard College. After attending Boston Latin School he too graduated from Harvard, in 1721. Chauncy settled into the pastorate of Boston’s First Congregational Church on 25 October 1727, where he stayed for sixty years. This position, combined with his intellectual power and strongly held opinions, enabled him tobecome the most prominent preacher in eighteenth-century Boston.

Old Lights. Chauncy became best known for his leadership of the Old Light Party of Congregationalism. This group formed in opposition to the religious upheavals of the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s. Chauncy and his followers objected mainly to the open emotionalism of the revivals being led by evangelical preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. Chauncy was especially dismayed by the emotional preaching of James Davenport, an itinerant preacher who openly criticized ministers more wary of the new revivals and who left divided churches wherever he preached. Edwards and other leaders of the awakenings tried to distance themselves from the excesses of men such as Davenport, but Chauncy saw all participation in the revivals as dangerous to religion and social order. His 1743 book, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England, exhaustively documented these dangers and was an important statement of the principles of the emerging liberal wing of New England Congregationalism.

Rationalism. At the heart of the Old Light thinking was a faith in reason that Chauncy and his followers got from thinkers active in the Enlightenment taking shape in Europe during the 1700s. Chauncy was drawn to reason as a way of integrating experience and faith into an orderly whole. His objection to the revivals was that they gave too much sway to the emotions as the basis of faith and of one’s knowledge of God, thus overemphasizing the irrational part of religious life. Unlike some believers in the power of reason, Chauncy never drifted away from Christianity toward deism. He believed in the Bible and explained it tirelessly to his parishioners as a rational exploration of the truth about God.

Universalism. Chauncy’s most radical contribution to American religion was in his thinking about salvation. As early as 1762 Chauncy began to think that Christ’s death had saved all humans, not only an elect few, as orthodox Calvinists believed. His reading of the Bible brought him to a belief in a benevolent, loving God, who wanted people to be happy and would never condemn humans to an eternity in hell. There would be punishment for sin, he thought, but only in proportion to the crime, and over time it would cleanse the soul and prepare it for an eventual entry into heaven. These were extremely radical ideas for the time, and he explored them cautiously, through letters and private papers exchanged with friends. He published his views only anonymously near the end of his life. Chauncy died on 10 February 1787.

Sources

Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705–1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980);

Charles H. Lippy, Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981).