Robinson Crusoe a Calvinist Tract [Archive]

Cal

17th May 2004, 06:58 AM

It was? Have any sources on that?

No, I just post Calvinistic propaganda lies in order for every one to think Calvinism has deeply impacted the world simply because it holds to the sovereignty of God, that freedom comes from Christ and not government, original sin and man can't be trusted, salvation is in God's hands and not man's, Christ died specifically for God's elect, free republics, words are more important than pictures and images (stimulating imagination), God created all in an orderly complex system that works together perfectly (like an orchestra), all the complexities of creation were created for man to discover, and God's callings include all trades and professions.

Just kidding. ^_^

Yes I do have support on that and I'm guessing you want to see it.

Well, here goes:

“On the surface, Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, told of the trials and tribulations of a shipwrecked sailor. But its author Daniel Defoe intended his story as a Calvinist tract. As a good Calvinist, the shipwrecked Crusoe reads his bible daily to preserve his belief in God’s sovereignty in the midst of spiritual doubts regarding the forces of civilization and nature. The third and final part of the book is seldom read or even printed today because Defoe preached so much in it he ruined his story.”

Source: The Progress of the Protestant by John Haverstick; Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco; 1968; p.112.

Daniel Defoe experienced a life full of God's providential intervention. Much of his life, he was in conflict with the English government for writing books and pamphlets considered offensive by the Anglican church. Like many Dissenters, he could have been persecuted, even as harshly as being exiled to the West Indies. He alternated thirteen times between being rich and being poor. Certain national calamities that occurred during Defoe's life probably had an impact on the formation of his spiritual convictions as well. The Plague of 1665, the Fire of 1666, and the Storm of 1705 were interpreted by many as consequences of God's wrath about the sin of the English people. Throughout his tumultuous life, Defoe most likely developed a capacity to recognize and depend on the providential care of God. This orientation would later become a major component of his famous work, Robinson Crusoe.

Understanding Defoe's background gives us a clear picture of how his experiences might have affected his writings. Such an understanding also highlights the formation of his convictions. A major theory among literary critics rests on the premise that Defoe was actually writing a spiritual autobiography, representing his own spiritual life in the character of Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe himself wrote, "I am most entertained with those actions which give me a light into the nature of man."4 (http://www.kingsmen.org/#notes) Three of his main theological convictions about the nature of man and the nature of God are illustrated in Robinson Crusoe. First, he believed that man has a sinful nature. James Sutherland writes of Defoe, "He believed that 'the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth,' and that 'if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.'"5 (http://www.kingsmen.org/#notes)

Second, Defoe believed that God is sovereign and man is completely responsible for his own actions. Defoe recognized God's sovereign ability to determine the events that take place in our lives, and he therefore came to the conclusion that man must assume ownership of his actions in response to God's direction.

Third, by examining the events that took place in Crusoe's life, it is clear that he understood the reality and importance of providential intervention in man's life. From his own experience with calamity and persecution, Defoe came to understand Providence, the personifying name given to the acting out of God's will on earth. Understanding Defoe's personal convictions allows one to understand the theological framework of Robinson Crusoe and better appreciate the message of the book.

Crusoe's early life is Defoe's representation of the sinful nature of Man. He rebels against his father, who wanted him to remain at home, and decides to venture abroad. Much like man's response to sin, Crusoe's initial decision to leave home is voluntary. As the story progresses, he has little control over the direction of his travels as his spiritual and physical conditions worsen. Having survived storms at sea, capture by pirates and a daring escape down the coast of Africa, Crusoe actively neglects and flouts each opportunity to reverse his course, living out a pattern of growing sin marked by a coldness to Providence and its threats and deliverances. Crusoe goes against both his father's will and divine warning, and he continues to act as a rebel when he lands safely in South America. He foolishly decides to leave his plantation on a slave trading ship, and he encounters the storm, which casts him on his island, Looking back, he said that he sailed "... in order to act the rebel to their authority and the fool to my own interest."6 (http://www.kingsmen.org/#notes) The following years of isolation epitomize the Puritan version of the plight of man separated from God by a gap of sin.

These rebellious sinful decisions leave Crusoe with no freedom. G.A. Starr writes:

Having cast off the submission he owes to paternal and divine authority, he finds no real freedom in its place. Not only in the period of real slavery [with the pirates], but throughout these wanderings, he is mastered by events rather than master of them.7 (http://www.kingsmen.org/#notes)

The belief that man is naturally sinful dominates the first part of the novel.

Another major theme presented through the character of Crusoe is God's providential salvation. God first provides physical salvation by allowing Crusoe to survive the storm and land on the island after the shipwreck. He was the only one who did survive. Crusoe recognizes his inability to save himself, which is likely the first step in recognizing the power of providential deliverance, when he says, "The sea, having hurried me along as before, landed me, or rather dashed me, against a piece of rock, and that with such force as it left me senseless, and indeed helpless, as to my own deliverance."8 (http://www.kingsmen.org/#notes) Once Crusoe arrives on the island and begins to become settled, several acts of God serve to get his attention. First, an earthquake shakes the island and leaves him calling on God to have mercy and spare him. However, this "foxhole religion" is meaningless because he does not understand or admit that God is in control of all things.

Later, a severe hurricane throws Crusoe into fits of sickness brought on by the wind and rain. During this illness, he has a dream in which he is told, "'Seeing all these things have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die.'"9 (http://www.kingsmen.org/#notes) The vision referred to all the providential acts that had occurred in Crusoe's life, and warned him against not repenting and against continuing in his rebellious sin. After this vision, Crusoe realizes that life is of God's planning and design and that all humans, as sinful beings, are not in control of their own circumstances.

God was not finished with His process of providential intervention in Crusoe's life. His heart was still cold to the salvation of Christ, though he had begun to accept his own sinful nature and the existence of a providential God. Through God's provision of physical care for him, Crusoe came to appreciate the existence and love of God and later built a faith on that foundation. When he landed on the island, Providence provided many more supplies than he needed to survive, including food, guns and ammunition, tools, cloth and a Bible. Later, Crusoe was astounded by the divine care provided for him when husks of corn that he carelessly threw away began to grow. This event became a turning point in Crusoe's life. He realized that God is ultimately sovereign and is in control of all events that occur. Over the next years, he becomes more amazed and ever more grateful as he continues to acknowledge the provision of food sources on the island, protection from cannibals, the companionship of Friday and eventually his own return to England to find himself rich and prosperous.

As Crusoe comes to identify these providential interventions, he recognizes God's calling for his response and does respond in faith. J. Paul Hunter explains the necessity of this initiation from God.

... [Crusoe] cannot even grasp the grace proffered him until God specifically interposes. Until then, he may in theory chose on the side of good, for he has (according to seventeenth and eighteenth-century Calvinist thought) free will, but in practice the result is inevitable: man is the victim of his depraved nature until God intervenes to free him.10 (http://www.kingsmen.org/#notes)

Through Crusoe's plight and response, Defoe is stressing the point that God must intervene to first free man from his sinful nature in order for redemption to occur. Crusoe responded to the process by realizing his sinful nature, and then progressed to accepting providential intervention before finally living in faith. Defoe would say that it was God's intervention that caused Crusoe to first admit his sinful nature. Once God has drawn Crusoe to himself, He continues to work in his life. Crusoe reads his Bible many times and feels compelled to share his faith with his companion Friday.

It is clear that Crusoe came to a final realization of the influence of Providence on his life as he writes in the concluding chapter of his story:

And thus I have given the first part of a life of fortune and adventure, a life of Providence's checker-work, and of a variety which the world will seldom be able to show the like of Beginning foolishly, but closing much more happily than any part of it ever gave me leave so much as to hope for.11 (http://www.kingsmen.org/#notes)

4. Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1963) v.

5. James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969) 202-3.

6. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (New York: Signet Classic, 1961) 45.

7. Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988) 45-6.

8. Defoe, 50.

9. Defoe, 90.

10. Hunter, "Daniel Defoe" 172.

11. Defoe, 295.

Source: Compiled from the net several years ago and can't find site(s) now:D

Cal

17th May 2004, 06:58 AM

“Those who have read the unabridged version know that Crusoe is more than an adventure novel; it is a tale of religious conversion, telling how an isolated man rebuilds Christendom from some bits of flotsam and a repentant heart. Here West provides another clue, demonstrating how, as Defoe aged, he grew more convinced of the dangers of secularism and of the need for religious integrity and a rigorous moral code.

Defoe expounded these ideas in a series of books, written at the same time as Crusoe, including The Family Instructor, Religious Courtship, and Conjugal Lewdness or Matrimonial Whoredom. All three works counsel a strict Christian life, dispensing advice on wayward sons, impious wives, the evil of contraception and abortion, and the danger of exercising the "frolic part" outside of the marriage chamber. As West points out, these texts not only establish Defoe as a champion of Christian virtue—a theme sounded over and over again in Crusoe—but also reveal his domestic happiness, including his love for his wife, Mary.”

Source: Books In Review
Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures
A Paradoxical Genius
Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures. By Richard West. Carroll & Graf. 427 pp. $26.
Reviewed by Philip Zaleski
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9906/reviews/zaleski.html (http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9906/reviews/zaleski.html)

In making fun of Calvinism and Crusoe’s reliance on Jesus Christ alone without the "required super powers" of the mass the Catholic Friar Richard Cash said:

“Calvinism's only great work of literature is Robinson Crusoe.” Of course he is wrong about the “only” and about the mass but right about the obvious Calvinism in Robinson Crusoe.

Source: http://www.sainthenry.org/corner/010901.htm (http://www.sainthenry.org/corner/010901.htm)

“Robinson Crusoe is an epic account of the experience of the English Dissenters (godly Calvinist Puritans and Presbyterians) under the Restoration (Catholics and Monarchy).”

Source: Tom Paulin (http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=paul01) He teaches at HertfordCollege, Oxford.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n14/print/paul01_.html (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n14/print/paul01_.html)