Nathanael Emmons

Nathanael Emmons (1745–1840) was a prominent New England Congregationalist minister and theologian whose long pastoral tenure in Franklin, Massachusetts, made him a significant figure in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American religious thought. A student of Samuel Hopkins, Emmons developed and refined the "New Divinity" theology, particularly through his doctrine of divine agency and human moral responsibility, which sought to reconcile Calvinist predestination with human free will. His numerous published sermons, including election sermons delivered before state legislatures, exercised considerable influence on American Protestant theology and ecclesiastical practice during the early republic.