The prism of scripture

Throughout seventeenth and eighteenth century England and New England the historical, doctrinal and prophetical parts of the Bible functioned as the paradigm (Thomas S. Kuhn) of a sophisticated tradition. Through an imaginative and skilful use of this paradigm the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) gave coherence to his critical studies of the Great Awakening, showed the limitations of other contemporary historiographical models and formulated his major program of a historical metaphysics as a resolution of the perennial problem of the one and the many in the thought of the West. By contrast, the Earl of Shaftesbury's (1671-1713) reduction of the paradigm diminished his view of history, impoverished his understanding of tradition and limited his view of nature.