David Tappan

David Tappan (1752–1797) was an influential American Congregationalist minister and theologian who served as pastor of the Brattle Street Church in Boston and later as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, where he shaped the theological education of a generation of New England clergy. His theological writings, including his Election Sermon, reflected the transitional moment between Calvinist orthodoxy and the emerging Unitarian thought that would come to dominate nineteenth-century New England Protestantism. Tappan's scholarly contributions to homiletics and systematic theology established him as a significant intellectual figure in the early American republic, despite his relatively brief career cut short by his death at age forty-five.