William Bentley, pastor in Salem, Massachusetts from 1783 to his
death in 1819, was unlike anyone else in America's founding
generation, for he had come to unique conclusions about how best to
maintain a traditional understanding of Christianity in a world
ever changing by the forces of the Enlightenment.
Like some of his contemporaries, Bentley preached a liberal
Christianity, with its benevolent God and salvation through moral
living, but he-and in New England he alone-also preached a rational
Christianity, one that offered new and radical claims about the
power of God and the attributes of Jesus. Drawing on over a
thousand of Bentley's sermons, J. Rixey Ruffin traces the evolution
of Bentley's theology. Neither liberal nor deist, Bentley was
instead what Ruffin calls a "Christian naturalist," a believer in
the biblical God and in the essential Christian narrative but also
in God's unwillingness to interfere in nature after the
Resurrection. In adopting such a position, Bentley had pushed his
faith as far as he could toward rationalism while still, he
thought, calling it Christianity.
But this book is as much a social and political history of Salem
in the early republic as it is an intellectual biography; it not
only delineates Bentley's ideas, but perhaps more important, it
unravels their social and political consequences. Using Bentley's
remarkable diary and a vast archive of newspaper accounts, tax
records, and electoral returns, Ruffin brings to life the sailors,
widows, captains and merchants who lived with Bentley in the
eastern parish of Salem.
A Paradise of Reason is a study of the intellectual and tangible
effects of rational religion in mercantile Salem, oftheology and
philosophy but also of ideology: of the social politics of race and
class and gender, the ecclesiastical politics of establishment and
dissent, the ideological politics of republicanism and classical
liberalism, and the party politics of Federalism and
Democratic-Republicanism. In bringing to light the fascinating life
and thought of one of early New England's most interesting
historical figures, Ruffin offers a fresh perspective on the
formative negotiations between Christianity and the Enlightenment
in the years of America's founding.
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