Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father by Thomas S. Kidd

Author:Thomas S. Kidd [Kidd, Thomas S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300217490
Google: DPfBDgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300217498
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:39:08.834000+00:00

In spite of his doubts about Christianity’s exclusive truth, working with Whitefield tempered Franklin’s outspokenness against traditional faith. Memories of his Boston upbringing also softened his views. In 1743, Franklin and his son William visited New England. They stayed in Boston with his sister Jane Mecom, at his childhood house. Jane remained a serious Calvinist and evangelical. They seem to have quarreled about religion while he was there, given a subsequent exchange of letters between them. She implored him to return to the faith of his upbringing. Her letter to him is lost, but it included an “admonition” about his lack of faith. Ben wrote back, saying that she had expressed herself as if he “was against worshipping of God, and believed good works would merit heaven.” These were mere fancies of her mind, he commented. It seems unlikely that Jane accused Ben of being against the worship of God altogether. But Franklin did believe that works were the determinant of one’s standing before God. Jane hardly made that up.39

Ben reminded Jane that he had composed his own book of devotions. Fifteen years after writing it, the prayer guide was still meaningful to him. At a minimum it served as a tool to counter Jane’s charge that he was impious. But Franklin especially refuted the notion (at least in this conversation) that he believed anyone could merit God’s favor by good works. He knew that traditionalists did believe that works were essential to the Christian life. Those good deeds could not earn God’s favor, however, or resolve the problem of unforgiven sin. Few would imagine that our paltry good deeds could merit us eternal life in heaven, he told Jane. However God assesses people in the afterlife, all stood in need of grace.40

Still, good deeds were the core of authentic Christianity. To demonstrate this, Franklin again turned a Calvinist argument to his advantage. He conceded that there were aspects of “your New England doctrines and worship” that he did not agree with. (“Your” New England theology is an interesting phrase. It was her theology, not his, as if they had not grown up in the same house. Here he postured as a sophisticated man to whom New England Calvinism was an object of analysis, not a personal legacy.) But he did not “condemn” those Calvinist beliefs, the Hemphill writings notwithstanding. Nor did he wish to turn Jane away from Calvinism. He just asked that she show him the same courtesy regarding his focus on good deeds. In a surprising move, he told Jane that even the great Calvinist theologian and Great Awakening leader Jonathan Edwards was on his side. He suggested that she consult Edwards on good works, providing a specific citation of seven pages from Edwards’s tome Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742). This was not a book Franklin had published, so he must have consulted Some Thoughts closely if he was able to reference a passage on works deep within the text.41

In

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