THEOLOGY IN AMERICA

THEOLOGY IN AMERICA

Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War

By E. Brooks Holifield

This book was published by Yale University Press in New Haven in 2003. It is divided into three parts ofdiscussions comprising Calvinist Origins (Part 1), The Baconian Style (Part 2), and Alternatives to Baconian Reason (Part 3).

Comment:

Surprisingly, this book is sensed to be very important in my dissertation writing since it can provide me a sort of a comprehensive landscape or map upon the development of Chistianity as the major religion in the United States, particularly in its colonial era until the nineteenth era, besides certainly the secondary data. Due to the mental map provided within the book, I can then grasp how the Christianity experienced series of intricacies in Americans following the one happening in Europe. This happened because theology of Christianity, figured out by the early American intellectuals or theologians, had appeared in many forms and it belongs to the deep side of a community’s growth as well. Besides, more importantly, this book simply comfirms my earlier view pertaining the religions in America that Americans’ theology has been formed and constructed in Protestant particularly in the Calvinism or the ‘Reformed’ Christianity. This book recognizes it so that it deals in the very beginning of its discussion with the intricacy of Calvinism. Calvin had taught that no event occurred apart the all-powerful direction of God and that salvation depended entirely on the divine will. Having believed in that God had chsen only a select number – the elect – for salvation, Calvin and his followers committed themselves to defend the doctrine of predestination.

Why the Calvinism is accepted by the Americans? Two key indicators are shown by the book in this case; that is, the reasonableness and practicality. It means that the Calvinist theology is suitable or sensed more easily with the human logics/ratonality and practical life – simple in its usefullness. As such, the development of Calvinism starting in New England in colonial era had already influenced the spread other subsequent theology movements in America. Even, more or less, the presence of Quakerism is uprooted to and inspired by that theology, although it has number of differences in terms of their practices and interpretations on the Scriptures. Due to the differences, Holifield slightly agrees that the Quakerism is an alternative theology of Christianity, instead of fully adopting the mainstream one. This theology, inferred from Holifield’s concept, can boldly be said as the ‘theological populists’ when looking who George Fox was; he was not a professional and academician. The Quakers then used to appoint herdsmen, plowmen, fishermen as the disciples, not the educated ones. Therefore, Holifield says that the Quakers felt confident that their lack of academic theological training was an aid to the discovery of truth, not a disadvantage.

The last but not least, one thing that is very important to note that this book informs me that theology has a very significant role to the American civilization/culture. It has subtly immersed in the minds of all kinds of people, intellectuals and porfessions. Theological ideas, quoting Holifield’s statement, have expressed social impulses and group tensions, they have manifested the psychological dynamics of their authors, and they have provided slogans for maintaning group of identity. 

Quotations:

I try to simply to show that Christian theology in America was part of a community of discourse that stretched back to the fisrt century and across the Atlantic to Europe and that certain persisting themes and questions created a set of issues that reapperaed for more than three centuries, drawing theologians from the nineteenth century into a conversation not only with each other but also with their predecessors. (p. Vii)

Theological ideas have always had multivalent meanings ad functions. They have expressed social impulses and group tensions, they have anifested the psychological dynamics of their authors, and they have provided slogans for maintaining group identity (p. Viii).

Until almost the dawning of the American Revolution, theologians exercised a singular authority in American print culture. Until late in the eighteenth century, they were, in each decade, the most-published authors in America. Their position of eminence faded after the Revolution, but even throughout the early nineteenth century, theology continued to command respect in American intellectual circles at the same time that it provided a vocabulary that informed the lived religion of ordinary Americans (p.1)

Theologians were the primary expositors of the new discipline of ‘mental science’, the chief proponents of moral science, and avid participants in the formation of natural philosophy, which would eventually transform itself into natural science. (p 1-2).

Poets and novelists – including Herman Melville, Nathaniel Howthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinsion, and Ralp Waldo Emerson – struggled with, and often against, the pronouncements of the theologians to such an extent that one can hardly hope to understand the nineteenth-century lirerary renaissance without knowing something about the theological ideas current in the culture. In an era when the common law allowed free latitude to local judges, theology often figured prominently in American legal descisions. American politicians spoke a public anguage that drew amply on theological conceptions...For almost three centuries, theologians enjoyed a position of substantial authority in the intellectual life of America (p. 2).

In early America, theology was normally understood to be a discipline that combined biblical interpretation with one or another form of backgroudn theory. What distinguished theology from devotional or inspirational writing or narratives of religious experience was its interdependence with various branches of philosophy, whether logic, metaphysics, epistemology, hermeneutics, rhetoric, or mental science, or of history, especially the historical study of the books of the Bible (p. 3-4)

The second generation of New England theologians expanded the interest in rationality, partly in response to the earliest English deists and partly in harmony with English natural philosophy, and during the eighteenth century, their successors adopted an understanding of reason in religion that can best be designated as “evidential” (p. 5).

The demand that theology be practical reflected not only the imperatives of revivalist religion and widespread assumption about the relation between theology and ethics but also a long history of reflection that had its root in ancient philosophy (p. 8).

By the seventeenth century, a few theologians defined theology as entirely practical, designed only to teach the faithful how to live piously and well and to attain blessedness through the light of God’s divine truth (p. 9).

Almost from the beginning, theologians in America emphasized the close connection between the practical and the moral, and even though some – usually designed by their critics as ‘antinomians’ – questioned the closeness of the connection, the ethical side of theology became increasingly prominent. By the eighteenth century, some redefined the practicality of theology to mean simply its usefulness as a guide to a life of virtue, and even those who retained older notions of the practical became engrossed in the issues presented by the emergence of moral philosophy (p. 10).

Historians of American religion have departed from earlier assumptions that the Calvinist clergy of New England deserve a place of special privilege in the national religious narrative, but New England Calvinism, and other forms of Calvinist theology elsewhere, attained to such a position of dominance in highly respected institutions, from denominations to colleges and seminaries, that most subsequent theological movements had to define themselves in relation to the Calvinist traditions (p. 10).

The defining mark of Reformed theology was its regard for the glory of God, which entailed a pronounced insistence on divine sovereignity. Calvin had taught that no event occurred apart the all-powerful direction of God and that salvation depended entirely on the divine will. Convinced by Calvin and his followers committed themselves to defend the doctrine of predestination, or election, againsst critics who charged that it implied an arbitrary and unjust God (p. 11).

The first century and a half of theology in America consisted largely of debates internal to the Reformed tradition. While seventeenth-century Quaker thought and eighteenth-century Anglicanism provided alternatives, the Reformed theologians, especially in New England, virtually monopolized theological publication and discussion (p. 12).

It is no accident that most theological movements in nineteenth century Americamust be described with denominational labels (p. 14).

No small degree of the appeal of the English Quaker movement was its assertion of the authority of the unlearned. The Quaker founders Geroge Fox and James Nayler presented the populist viewpoint in 1653 when they asserted that the true ministry was a gift of Jesus Christ and needed ‘no addition of human help and learning’. They used the standard argument that Jesus ‘chose herdsmen, fishermen, and plowmen, as his disciples and fitted them immediately witout help of man. The Quakers felt confident that their lack of academic theological training was an aid to the discovery of truth, not a disadvantage (p. 18).

Both groups – the professionals and the populists – advertised the practicality of theology and shared in the quest for the reasonable (p. 19).

They (the New England Calvinists) thought of theology as a delicate balance of human reasoning and divine biblical revelation, an appeal to ‘the evidence of scripture and reason’. They aspired to give reason its due credit while subordinating it always to the revealed Word (p. 25).

In demanding a reasonable religion, the Cambridge Platonists defined REASON not only as the capacity to unify the materials of sense perception but also, more importantly, as the operation of innate ideas, of principles prior to sensory experience, or of instuitions able to grasp supersensuous truths...Reason particiated in universal and eternal ideas that could have their grounding only in the eternal mind of God. Human reason participated in divine reason (p. 59).

Calvinists believed that God governed the world through both natural causation and supernatural intervention. Most maintained a sense of balance between grace and nature, revelation and reason, and special providence and natural order (p. 79).

When the great struggle over slavery in America intensified in the early nineteenth century, it wa snatural for Americans on both sides of the issue to appeal to the Bible. The proslavery Virginia Baptist Thornton Stringfellow, confident that the Bible would support his position, claimed that everyone ‘ought to look into the Bible, and see what is in it about slavery’. The anitslavery New School Presbyterian Albert Barnes, on the other hand, felt that future generations would look back upon the defences of slavery drawn from the Bible, as among the most remarkable instances of mistaken interpretation and unfounded reasoning furnished by the perversities of the human mind (p.494).

John Saffin argued that American slavery was a positive good for it enabled Africans to accept Christian truth ( 495).

Proslavery theologians returned to the curse of Canaan (Gen. 9:25-27), arguing that Africans were Canaan’’s offspring. Abolitionists replied that Canaan’s offspring were the Canaanites, who suffered the consequences of the curse when they lost their land to the armies of Joshua (p. 496).

Written by: Dr. H. Nuriadi Sayip