Samuel Hopkins

Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803) was an American Congregational minister and theologian. A graduate of Yale, he studied divinity under Jonathan Edwards and served the church at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, from 1743 before becoming pastor of the First Congregational Church of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1770. His revision of Edwards's Calvinism became known as Hopkinsianism, or the New Divinity, and was set out in A System of Doctrines Contained in Divine Revelation (1793). He was among the first Congregational ministers to attack slavery, in A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans (1776). His collected works, with a memoir by Edwards Amasa Park, appeared in Boston in 1854.