Evangelical Time, Separatism, and the “Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole”

Abstract

This essay intercedes in our understanding of the temporal formations that characterized New England’s Great Awakening (1730s-1740s). It takes as its case study the Connecticut farmer Nathan Cole, whose spiritual new birth scholarship has been seen as prototypical of both the instantaneity and the affect of evangelical conversion. This essay contests the predominance of these figurations of the awakenings. Offering literary criticism’s first full engagement with Cole’s archive, rather than keeping to well-known short extracts from his “Spiritual Travels,” it posits the interval as the temporal and literary form that structures Cole’s writing. The essay thus reads Cole’s narrative as something more than a lay account that testifies to evangelical feeling, arguing that his writing instead exhibits continuities with seventeenth-century habits of thought. Particularly, it traces how Cole’s writing carries into the eighteenth century Puritan labors to apprehend doctrines (such as predestination) that were, fundamentally, matters of time. In treating Cole’s text as a document of theological heft and temporal consciousness, as well as spiritual encounter, this essay also asks scholars to consider how turning toward cognitive aspects of devotion provokes our field’s understanding of genre, time, and evangelical experience.