Joseph Huntington

Joseph Huntington (1735-1794), born in Windham, Connecticut, and a 1762 graduate of Yale, was pastor of the First Church of Coventry, Connecticut, from 1763 until his death, and served as a trustee of Yale, which awarded him the degree of D.D. He was a brother of Samuel Huntington, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Though outwardly an orthodox Congregationalist, he privately concluded that the Calvinist system, consistently understood, issued in the salvation of all people; his argument appeared posthumously as Calvinism Improved (1796), an early American statement of universal salvation.

A posthumous bombshell from inside New England orthodoxy. Joseph Huntington was a respected Connecticut Congregationalist, a doctor of divinity of unquestioned standing — and, as this manuscript revealed after his death, a secret universalist. His argument is the striking one his title implies: that Calvinism's own premises, sovereign grace and Christ's satisfaction, lead not to the salvation of a few elect but of all people. Its publication scandalized Connecticut and provoked an official reply, showing how far universalist conclusions had penetrated the very citadel of Calvinism.

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