After having surveyed the barrenness of the valley in which were scattered skeletal remains, the prophet in the book of Ezekiel was asked, “O mortal man, can these bones live?” And his reply was not an optimistic “they will live” but rather “O Lord God, thou knowest.” When the historian begins to discuss the common theological assumptions and issues which perplexed the seventeenth century, he does not know whether they can be put into a meaningful context and is uncertain that these “bones” can be made to live. The recent historian who made a large American audience aware of seventeenth-century thought was the late Perry Miller who summarized the New England strands of thought in an essay entitled “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity.” Miller argued that theology was a part of the essence, the very marrow, of Puritanism to which a copious amount of thought was devoted. The seriousness of the Puritan concern was witnessed by the succession of able theologians from William Ames and Richard Baxter in the seventeenth century, to Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Chauncy in the eighteenth century.
This work was conducted under IDA's central research program, contract DASW01 04 C 0003, CRP 3036, for DARPA/IXO. The publication of this IDA document does not indicate endorsement by the Department of Defense, nor should the contents be construed as reflecting the official position of that Agency.
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