Book Description

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a diverse contingent of American religious figures promoted the idea of an open canon of divine revelation. Transcendentalists, Hicksite Quakers, Mormons and Shakers defined their faith against a culture that they accused of relegating religion's defining revelations to the ancient past. In this they were joined by some of the most notable characters of their generation, ranging from the provocative African-American prophetess Sojourner Truth to the influential theologian Horace Bushnell. Powerfully wielding this heterodox doctrine, these revelationists left a lasting imprint on the United States' religious culture. This dissertation explores the reasons why the first half of the nineteenth century proved so conducive to the notion of an open canon. Focusing on ideas -- rather than on social or psychological explanations -- it argues that a confluence of conceptual trends gave the tenet of continuing revelation special currency in the antebellum era. It proposes the existence of a "revelatory equation," which reasons that a cultural commitment to the necessity of divine revelation (A), when combined with a sense that the textual source of such revelation is historically distant (B), could both generate and justify appeals to continuing revelations (C). A + B = C. This dissertation argues that antebellum Americans occupied a culture in which -- in response to both deistical attacks on Christianity and historically minded treatments of the Bible -- the A and the B variables of the revelatory equation had never been more pronounced. They subsequently sustained an unusual amount of C. In short, antebellum Americans were living in the sum of a grand cultural equation. The simplicity of this formulation, however, belies the intricate combination of factors in which that cultural logic was embedded. The sequential progression of this society's revelatory reasoning weaved through such phenomena as the rise of common-sense epistemologies, conceptions of natural law, the cult of domesticity, and, of course, the Second Great Awakening. In large measure, to recreate the story of continuing revelation in early American thought is to reconstruct the broad contours of that thought itself -- Author's abstract.