ABSTRACT
Attempts on the part of British Reformed or Calvinistic churches and clergy to maintain, define, or modify their spiritual connection with the high orthodoxy of the seventeenth century are notoriously difficult to chart in the midst of the political pressures, the philosophical changes, the deconfessionalization and the denominational disintegration of the eighteenth century.1 The problem is exacerbated by the general lack of attention given to the more formal theology of more or less orthodox Protestant writers in the era of what can be called late orthodoxy, when the main trends in theology and philosophy, at least according to the dominant narrative found among intellectual historians, had all gone the way of Enlightenment rationalism. This problem, moreover, is one that has been highlighted in the recent work of James Bradley, who has demonstrated the significance of neglected connections between Calvinistic (as distinct from Deist, Rationalist and Unitarian) Dissent and the radical politics of the era.2 My own small contribution to this volume in his honour is to examine the nature of that more traditional Calvinist thought in its relation to the intellectual currents of the time by way of an examination of Philip Doddridge’s thought as found primarily in his Course of lectures on the principal subjects in pneumatology, ethics, and divinity, delivered in the Dissenting Academy at Northampton over the course of two decades, from 1730 to shortly before his death, and published posthumously
1 See Michael Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford, 1978-95), I, pp. 366-93, 464-71; cf. Alan F.P. Sell, ‘Presbyterianism in Eighteenth-Century England: the Doctrinal Dimension’ in Dissenting Thought and the Life of the Churches (San Francisco, 1990), pp. 118-68; and David L. Wykes, ‘The Dissenting academy and Rational Dissent’ in Knud Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 121-30; also note Ernest Alexander Payne, ‘Eighteenth century English Congregationalism as exemplified in the life and work of Philip Doddridge’ in Review & Expositor, 48/3 (1951), pp. 286-301.
