Background
Chauncy was born into the elite Puritan merchant class that ruled Boston. His great-grandfather, Charles Chauncy, after whom he was named, was the second president of Harvard. His father was a successful Boston merchant.
Chauncy was born into the elite Puritan merchant class that ruled Boston. His great-grandfather, Charles Chauncy, after whom he was named, was the second president of Harvard. His father was a successful Boston merchant.
He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow.
Charles Chauncy spent most of his life in Boston, becoming a leader of the liberal wing of New England Congregationalism from his post as pastor of the city’s leading church.
Chauncy became best known for his leadership of the Old Light Party of Congregationalism.
Chauncy and his followers objected mainly to the open emotionalism of the revivals being led by evangelical preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.
Chauncy was especially dismayed by the emotional preaching of James Davenport, an itinerant preacher who openly criticized ministers more wary of the new revivals and who left divided churches wherever he preached.
At the heart of the Old Light thinking was a faith in reason that Chauncy and his followers got from thinkers active in the Enlightenment taking shape in Europe during the 17006.
Chauncy was drawn to reason as a way of integrating experience and faith into an orderly whole.
His objection to the revivals was that they gave too much sway to the emotions as the basis of faith and of one’s knowledge of God, thus overemphasizing the irrational part of religious life.
Chauncy’s most radical contribution to American religion was in his thinking about salvation.
There would be punishment for sin, he thought, but only in proportion to the crime, and over time it would cleanse the soul and prepare it for an eventual entry into heaven.
These were extremely radical ideas for the time, and he explored them cautiously, through letters and private papers exchanged with friends.
He published his views only anonymously near the end of his life.
Chauncy settled into the pastorate of Boston’s First Congregational Church on 25 October 1727, where he stayed for sixty years.
Unlike some believers in the power of reason, Chauncy never drifted away from Christianity toward deism.
As early as 1762 Chauncy began to think that Christ’s death had saved all humans, not only an elect few, as orthodox Calvinists believed.
He believed in the Bible and explained it tirelessly to his parishioners as a rational exploration of the truth about God.
He was a charter member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was recognized by the Massachusetts Historical Society (when his portrait was hung there) as "eminent for his talents, learning, and lover of liberty, civil and religious.
president