Tuesday, March 10, 2026

It is the 10th of March 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

It’s Tuesday, and I am in Alabama- the plan was to do mailbag shows while I was traveling. But I in the past made a note for me in the future saying “when it’s March 10th, you should do a show on Nathaniel Taylor”- thanks, me in the past. And with our recent shows touching on things like the “the Openness of God” debate and a word about (and terrible pun) on Supralapsarianism, it all the more germane.

 

American history between the Revolution and the Civil War should look foreign to modern Americans. Call it “the first republic” if you wish, but this was much more a loose coalition of states and uneasy alliances. The church experienced the First Great Awakening in the lead-up to the Revolution and set the template for a moderate form of Calvinism blended with the Methodist and Baptist emphasis on personal conversion. This made some uneasy; some denominations saw this and began to circle their wagons.

 

The “Second Great Awakening” began in the frontier in the early 1800s and pushed the generally Reformed theological consensus to form a larger tent for evangelical Protestantism.

 

And here we meet Nathaniel Taylor. Let me give you the rundown- born in 1786 in New Milford, Connecticut, he graduated from Yale in 1807, was ordained pastor of the First Church of New Haven, and returned to Yale to work under Timothy Dwight. This puts him in the stream of Jonathan Edwards and the New England theology- that brand of Calvinism that was friendly to moderate revival.

 

With a tip of the hat to Tim, who wrote it, the debate about “predestination” amongst the New England theologians would surround the “Supralapsarian” and “infralapsarian” positions. That is, the logical order of the decrees of God. SO- in the “supra” position, God decrees election and damnation before the fall. The “infralapsarian” position says the decrees to election and damnation come after the fall… Is it a logical shell game? Might be. But here’s the deal: Nathaniel Taylor will rock the cradle by positing what would become known as the “New Haven” theology coming out of his position at Yale.

 

To his opponents, Taylor was an Arminian at best and a Pelagian at worst. Let me define: an Arminian believes in original sin and in our inability without prevenient grace to turn to God. But the will is emphasized. A Pelagian would say- and would be condemned by much of the historic church- that humans are untouched by Adam’s sin and have an undamaged moral sense and will.

 

Taylor is outspoken in his preaching about the place of free will, from a philosophical perspective, in trying to free God of the guilt of the world's evil, and, in a moral sense, in teaching that everyone had an undamaged will. He has his critics, of course- from names like Charles Hodge and Bennet Tyler (whose “Tylerism” will combat “Taylorism”). But here’s why I wanted to turn the spotlight his way- his controversy marks a turning point in American evangelical history when it was defining its own interdenominational boundaries. There’s the split between “New School” and “Old School”, “old lights” vs. “new lights” and the like- but the question for the coming years and centuries is how big the broad evangelical tent can be. The parallel to the Openness debate at the turn of this century is in asking “to what extent do doctrines surrounding the sovereignty of God unite the broad evangelical movement?”

 

Nathaniel Taylor may have been considered a borderline heretic to the Old Divinity folk in the Calvinist camp, but in the nascent world of Christian publishing and news, Taylor had another reputation: defender of revival (a popular position amongst the people) and an opponent of Unitarianism. And if he’s defending the divinity of Christ against the Unitarians and their modernArianism- he must be on the side of the Orthodox. And he studied under Timothy Dwight just downstream from Jonathan Edwards!

 

As Taylorism, or New Haven theology, is made a mainline theological “option,” the hold that the old Calvinists had on the evangelical mainline began to weaken. There would be, for a time, a big tent for American evangelicalism before the coming Fundamentalist/Modernist split.

 

Nathaniel Taylor would continue in the public eye and as professor of Didactic theology at Yale until his death on this, the 10th of March in 1858- born in 1786, he was 71 years old.

 

 

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and a nice little reading from 1 Corinthians 10:

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. 2 They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. 3 They all ate the same spiritual food 4 and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 10th of March 2026, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man surely noting today's date written out makes us think of Italian plumbers… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man still wondering how the rock “accompanied” them and likes the Jewish tradition of it rolling alongside them… I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.