A Sensible Faith: A Philosophical Reconstruction of the Theology of Charles Chauncy

The following dissertation intends the exposition, through the tools of analytic philosophy, of the theology of the New England Divine Charles Chauncy (1705-1787), minister for over sixty years of Boston´s prominent First Church. Particularly, our aim has been to explicate our subject´s theology on the doctrines of original sin, the atonement, and his thoughts concerning the afterlife. It has been also our attempt to lay out the manner in which these strands of his theological reflection can be made rigorous, and the contribution his ideas could make to contemporary philosophical theology. As the pages of this work will reveal, he had an original doctrinal proposal for the dogma of original sin, an exemplarist understanding of the doctrine of atonement, and a novel, and in various respects forward-looking proposal for the process by which indeterministically free and rational creatures attain salvation, and hence union with their maker. Our theologian was probably the most eminent representative of a religious movement that in a relatively short period of time would break away from traditional Puritan orthodoxy and would come to embrace more rational, and thus liberal, forms of religious expression. We believe that a closer look at his theology, something which has been rather neglected by academic research, could shed new light on a period of history that proved crucial in the evolution of American religion.