Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War

by E. Brooks Holifield

This book, the most comprehensive survey of early American Christian theology ever written, encompasses scores of American theological traditions, schools of thought, and thinkers. E. Brooks Holifield examines mainstream Protestant and Catholic traditions as well as those of more marginal groups. He looks closely at the intricacies of American theology from 1636 to 1865 and considers the social and institutional settings for religious thought during this period.The book explores a range of themes, including the strand of Christian thought that sought to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christianity, the place of American theology within the larger European setting, the social location of theology in early America, and the special importance of the Calvinist traditions in the development of American theology. Broad in scope and deep in its insights, this magisterial book acquaints us with the full chorus of voices that contributed to theological conversation in America's early years.

Genres: History, Theology, Religion, American History, Nonfiction, Christianity, Church History

640 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Bruno Romano · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great survey of American theology for any interested reader. Reading just flows joyfully.

Another reviwer pointed well that Hollifield chooses breath over depth. It's true. You get an overview of main controversies, views, and ocassionaly arguments, but with it you're still left sitting without grasping how deep and complex those arguments were. It's therefore hard to use this book as a "pick your side in theology" reading, since it won't give you ability to defend and argue for any specific topic. It's just an overview on what was said, why, how, and against who.

Another issue that follows from this: there is not a real interpreation of theological history. The book's main thesis is that, when publishing their works, theologians in America would join a transatlantic and ecletic debate on main issues of theology, so the whole setting was a huge conversation between all groups. Another thesis is that theologians rules the realm of ideas in America. This is great, but it doesn't give you deeper causes, ways and consequences of theological choices, and leaves out their practical result even in shaping American character and the initial shape of XX century thinking. This is a book of historical theology, not history in it's general sense. It deals with tracts, books, sermons, and theological debates, without providing in deepth interpreation of their causes, hidden meanings and relationships with other areas of knowledge.

To put in simple: one migh ask how, why and if New School Calvinism fell short of WCF standards. Holifield won't tell you that, but what Charles Hodge thought of it.

Despite this, it's a great work of history, even if from a more factual and imparcial stance. Certainly a MUST read to anyone trying to understand one's place in american christian debate.

[Jeremy Canipe · Rating 5 out of 5]

E. Brooks Holifield is the Chandler Professor Emeritus of American Church History at Emory University's Chandler School of Theology, a major divinity school of the United Methodist Church.

Having studied with the late historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom, author of A Religious History of the American People, Holifield wrote a different sort of book, but one which accomplished Holifield's goals splendidly. Early on, Professor Holifield sets out the outline of his book. He traces American religious history and American social and intellectual history from the English and colonial era through the coming of the Civil War. In doing so, he demonstrates a remarkable fluidity in t. he theological, philosophical, scientific, political, and social thought of a tremendous range of pastors, college professors, and others, in a deeply organized manner.

Rather than a full critical analysis, my writing below will try to give a sense of the book's thematical and temporal sweep, while relying heavily on some really terrific quotations which, I hope, will encourage readers to dive in!

The first of the book's 3 sections, Holifield seeks to lay out the theology and world view of the American Puritans. "From one perspective, it makes sense to speak of a "New England Mind" among the learned... But it is equally accurate to depict the history of theology in seventeenth-century New England as a troubled progression marked by a continual dispute, often grounded in disagreements about the covenant." (42).

One additional fascinating theme which begins in early colonial New England was a desire for a reasonable faith and one supported by evidence in the sense of Francis Bacon's epistemology and scientific method. "By the second half of the [17th] century, [New England's pastor-theologians] attended to questions of natural science and natural theology that were pressed upon them largely by discussions in England. They began to write about meteors and comets as well as conversion." (56).

This portion of the book necessarily considers Jonathan Edwards is significant detail. While some read [Jonathan Edwards] chiefly as a philosophical theologian, immersed in conversation with Locke, Malebracnche, the Cambridge Platonists, or the British moralists, others, like his first biographer Samuel Hopkins, emphasized that he 'studied the Bible more than any other books' and that his most frequent recourse as a theologian was to such works of biblical criticism such as Matthew Poole's Synoptic Criticorum...and Matthew Henry's Exposition of the Old and New Testament." (104).

Let the reader assume Holifield had an old-fashioned over-focus on New England, he does trace the story of theology in colonial British North American to the American South.

The second section might be seen as an argument over Edwards. ""In 1787 Jonathan Edwards, Jr., divided the clergy of New Connecticut into three groups: Edwardians, Arminians, and "moderate" Calvinists."...A similar alignment prevailed through New England."

In this context, the book looks at the ways in which, from an orthodox Christian faith perspective, many 18th century American pastors moved above from basic Christian theology. In large degree, those who did seemed to hav been influence by the Enlightenment in the following ways:

○Jesus being the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity (p. 133);
○The exclusivity of the gospel in favor of universalism (pp. 133-134);
○The eternal damnation of the lost (p. 133); and
○The imputation of Adam's sin to all humanity
(pp. 130-132, p. 144).

But, to let Holifield tell his own story, I will note the he moves forward over several chapters to look at these topics and disputes. "The thinkers usually designated as deists ... particularly their attacks on the belief in biblical revelation, produced, by way of reaction, a renewal of interest in the Christian evidences [and] the later prominence of the Baconian style of theology in nineteenth-century America - a style calling for empirical, inductive, and nonspeculative modes of thought." (139).

The upshot of this section, to my view, is well summed up by this quotation: "Long before [William Ellery] Channing [1780-1842] rose to prominence [as a key Unitarian theologican] the liberal clergy in New England had ceased to talk much about a Trinitarian God, and more than a few had ceased to believe in one." (199).

In this next section of the book, Holifield focused on a wide range of Christian and non-Christian religious movements that arose in 19th century America. For example, he stated that "[t]he Unitarians spoke for a society of merchants and civic leaders, the Universalists for a society of mechanics, farmers, and shopkeepers...Despite the doctrinal similarities [they] had a different leadership and appealed to a different social class." (219).

"[L]ike their English predecessors, the [Episcopalians] fell into groupings of latitidinarians" who "sought a reasonable faith that dispensed with doctrinal strictures", "evangelicals" who "espoused views of scripture and religious faith that led them into a closer alliance with other American Protestants" and "high-church theologians" who "maintained a veneration of tradition." (234)

"Defining themselves as much in contrast to Universalists and Calvinists as in continuity to their Anglican heritage, Methodists came to be associate with a brief list of doctrines - regeneration, perfection, and the witness of the Spirit- that they used to interpret their evangelical piety." (271).

"Devoted almost single-mindedly to the authority of the Bible, the Baptist movement nonetheless read the Bible through lenses provided by both the Baconian impulse and the Calvinist tradition." (271).

"Black authors produced theological texts - sermons, essays, public addresses - that fell into two genres...expositions that mirrored the standard themes of the denominational traditions [and] a protest literature [regarding southern enslavement, northern inequality, and theodicy regarding these injustices] cast in theological forms." (307).

Many new religions, such as the Hicksite Friends, the Shakers, the Mormons, which claimed Christian roots but espoused a wide range of non-orthodox and non-Christian theologies cropped up in pre-Civil War America. They were linked by a democratic rejection of learned pastor-theologians and "the quite different idea that God continued to provide new truth through immediate revelation to faithful believers or to chosen prophets." (319)

Beginning in the 1820s, "[t]he Old School Calvinists of the Presbyterian churches positioned themselves as the defenders of the true Calvinists against critics and revisionists on every side." (370)

"Far more intent on fidelity to traditional witnesses to scriptural truth than on stating proofs for the compatibility of reason and faith, the [Lutheran] confessionalists represented a conservative turn away from Baconianism." (414)

"Something about the claims of American Protestants that reason was on their side, however, drew from Catholic theologians a sustained attack on reason's pretensions." (423)

He argues provocatively that the old seeking to resolve social disputes by reference to Scripture failed American theolgoicans in the run up to the American Civil War due to disptues on how God's word applied to the issue of enslavement.

As a coda, Holifield quickly sweeps over the post-bellum theological and social landscape to the dawn of the 20th century. Here, he fixed his eye, noting that "[w]hen George Gordon delivered his Beecher Lectures at Yale in 1901, he acknowledged that for him, and for many in his audience, the theology that once echoed in the divinity school's lecture rooms had 'lost its authority.' ... But he could look back at the older theologians and recognize the force that they had once exerted on the religious culture of the nation. He thought it was a history worth remembering. (510-511).

[Matt Cavedon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wide-reaching and comprehensive, Holifield organizes his discussions of different theological strands by their approaches to evidential reasoning as support for Christian truth vs. other logical approaches, high learning vs. populism, and salient problems each sought to address. Definitely a great balance of orthodox and innovative positions, and probably my first total map of American Protestantism.

Naturally, the material is limited to what antebellum American theologians concerned themselves with. That means relatively little attention is given to speculative theology, the sacraments, and other questions with considerable importance in other contexts.

I mark down Holifield for two particular shortcomings. First, his style sometimes chooses breadth over depth, becoming at some points more a list of primary sources for readers more educated than I than a real introduction. Secondly, the reader should have more of a background in early Calvinism than I did to keep up with about half of the book - Calvinism was at the heart, or the object of hatred, for much of the subject matter covered by the book. I wish I came with better preparation for knowing what the key debates were - or that Holifield spent an introductory chapter canvassing them.

Definitely not a book for someone without a good grasp of Western Christian theology coming in, as the comments above should hint.

[Samuel G. Parkison · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content of this book was very interesting. Holifield is readable insofar as sentence structure is concerned, but his rigid allegiance to merely communicating the facts made reading this volume a bit of a bore. I would have appreciated a little editorializing if it would have made him tell a story.

The story that you *can* construct with bare facts Holifield gave, though, is a tragic one. One can almost hear the clamor of Israelites begging for a king like the other pagans in America’s baconian evidentialism; theologians in America have wanted so desperately to be considered wise and rational to others that they were willing to subject the validity of Scripture’s authority to man-wrought criteria of “reasonableness.” The effects of such vanity are self-evident. If scriptures authority rests on man’s estimation of its reasonableness, skeptics and Deists are justified to dismiss the entire concept of revelation, Unitarians are justified to dismiss the Trinity, Methodists are justified to dismiss the biblical doctrines of grace, etc. Neutrality is a myth, and there is no such thing as a brute fact; no matter how many you pile up, they won’t get you to Trinitarian, biblical Christianity—Trinitarian, biblical Christianity must *interpret* the facts, not the other way around. Letting man call the shots on the validity of God’s revelation will never end well; there’s no way to just be a “little bit of an evidentialist”—that’s a black hole that will refuse to quit sucking. This thorough work is a retelling or America falling down that slippery slope.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an era when American religious scholars “have turned their attention away from literate elites, the history of ideas, the abstractions of intellectuals, and the activities of leaders,” E. Brooks Holifield makes a case for studying theology in order to understand American life and culture from 1636 to 1865. In Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War, he argues that “one important feature of Christian religious life in early America was an extensive tradition of theological reflection…that linked [Americans] to a trans-Atlantic world.” As he says in his Introduction, “theologians ruled the realm of ideas” for more than a century in colonial America, waned slightly during the American Revolution in competition with political and philosophical publications, but endured into the nineteenth century as it still “commanded respect in American intellectual circles at the same time it provided a vocabulary that informed the lived religion of everyday Americans.” In addition to the trained, academic theologians in American history, which he unapologetically gives more time to, Holifield also gives voice to “populist” theologians of various stripes including those of the nineteenth century “folk-theology” variety—Quakers, Shakers, Mormons, African-American theologians, etc. In this way, he not only takes a fresh look at how more traditional, academic theologians influenced group identity and thought on the North American continent, but he also adds to his discussion less-known but equally influential religious thinkers in American history.�

With respect to the book’s organization, Holifield groups his work into three parts: “Calvinist Origins,” “The Baconian Style,” and “Alternatives to Baconian Reason.” Holifield defends the influence of New England Calvinism as foundational to the Reformed traditions that grew out of it in Part 1 of his book. He points out the irony that in defending conservative theology, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theologians “accentuated the function of reason in theology. Part 2 explores the theologians who engaged with the “Baconian evidentialist style:” using empirical reason and science to justify theology. The fact that American theologians found support from eighteenth-century Scottish philosophical theories (known as Common Sense Realism), bolsters Hoilfield’s trans-Atlantic argument. This part is organized into denominational traditions, which proved useful in explaining what theologians thought of their respective denominations as well as allowing Holifield to juxtapose various denominations. For example, Hoilfield explains that Unitarians and Episcopalians valued a learned clergy whereas Universalists and Methodists generally distrusted an educated elite. He identifies Baptists, Christians, African-Americans, Quakers, Shakers, and Mormons as denominations given to populist rhetoric that moved away from a heavy reliance on an educated clergy and traditional theological learning and toward empowering its individual congregants. Part 3 addresses challenges to Baconian evidentialism by Lutheran, Catholic, and transcendentalist thinkers in order to chart the shift toward modern liberalism in American theology. Holifield points out that the transition is neither clean nor total; evidential style persisted in many theological traditions as well as the ethical import of theology.

[Mike]

Christians of all stripes bemoan the state of the church today whether it is the liberals who are ashamed of the conservatives, or the other way around. Funny how little has changed. From the very solid theology of those whose rule of faith is the Bible to those whose god has a wax nose that changes as human whim dictates. Holifeild inspires and horrifies anyone who has a church they like to call home.
I particularly liked reading about the slave churches and the strength of many of the people who knew the answer to Peter's question "Lord, to whom shall we go".

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of the subject from its beginnings until the civil war, but lacking the original argumentation and attention to context that Noll's book gives to the same subject.

[Chrisanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extensive and oh-so-thorough.