This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

中文翻译：

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“虔诚的融合”：想象 18 世纪早期波士顿、Tranquebar 和 Halle 的全球新教

这篇文章重新审视了以波士顿公理会牧师和神学家科顿·马瑟、伟大的虔诚主义神学家奥古斯特·赫尔曼·弗兰克、后者在哈雷和伦敦的几位同事以及哈雷赞助的丹麦殖民地特兰克巴尔的路德会传教士为中心的网络。它追寻的问题是，这个网络（从大约 1710 年到 1730 年代存在）揭示了“新教”的概念如何演变为一种神学结构，以及“新教”作为一种宗教身份类别是如何产生意义和共鸣的跨越宗派和语言的鸿沟。通过波士顿-哈雷-特兰克巴的交流，这篇文章认为，“新教”分别。这反映了“新教”的历史发展如何与关于“宗教”和人类不同“宗教”的更大的哲学和神学辩论交织在一起，启蒙思想家和觉醒的基督徒都参与其中。最初在该网络的通讯员中发展起来的独特版本的“新教”将在 18 世纪的跨大西洋觉醒中继续发展，并在 19 世纪保持影响力。