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The Making of American Liberal Theology

Reviewed by David B. Parke, Ph.D.

Editor of The Unitarian Epic

The Making of American Liberal Theology:

Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900

by Gary Dorrien

Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001

The Making of American Liberal Theology:

Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950

by Gary Dorrien

Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003

The Making of American Liberal Theology:

Crisis, Irony, and Modernity, 1950-2005

by Gary Dorrien

Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006

At the founding convocation of Collegium at Craigville, Mass. in October, 1975, Robert Carter, a participant, addressed the assembled company. “I can’t help but think,” he said, “of the characterization of a philosopher as a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there, followed by the characterization of a theologian as a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there — and finding it” (Collegium insert, Kairos Number 2, Winter, 1976, 1).

Of every major constructive narrative work, we ask that it meet three standards. First, it must be based on original sources. Second, it must compare and contrast ideas, thinkers, and movements so that we understand them in relation to each other as well as intrinsically in themselves. Third, it must be presented in the context of institutional, national, and world events as a strand or theme in the larger story of the human experiment on earth.

Gary Dorrien’s magnum opus, The Making of American Liberal Theology in three volumes, conspicuously fulfills each of these expectations. For the better part of a decade the author has immersed himself in the formative literature of American religious thought and experience. His bibliographic infrastructure is unfailingly impressive, with evidence of wide and deep reading in the sources of every branch of American Christianity. In the first volume he gives us thinkers as diverse as Channing, Bushnell, Theodore Munger, Nathaniel William Taylor, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Herbert Spencer, and Borden Parker Bowne in their own words, each in a fully realized portrait as a work in progress. He tells us where they came from, what hopes and fears drove them toward the methods and conclusions they embraced, and the leading ideas that attach to their names and reputations. Dorrien is dissatisfied with derivative scholarship, while including the titles of numerous interpretive works that enhance the reader’s range of resource.

As the compiler of a source book on Unitarian history, I was gratified to find no less than eight references to The Epic of Unitarianism, extending from Charles Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts to the Humanist Manifesto.

The author may not have read everything relevant to his theme, but he has read enough to persuade us that his statements are well-founded and his judgments are sure. Page after page contains summaries of arguments, contested points of doctrine, new insights on old problems, and vivid biographical details of the protagonists of American liberal theology as they work out their faith affirmation in the new world.

Here is a typical example: “Bushnell . . . especially disliked Taylor’s house of syllogisms . . . For all his modifications, Taylor was a caretaker of a scholastic tradition, carrying on the idioms of New England Calvinism and, like his theological heroes, affecting an air of certainty. This latter trait, especially, grated on Bushnell; Taylor treated religious doubts as weakness of faith, deficient understanding, or both, but Bushnell had never lived a doubt-free day. Taylor would remember Bushnell as a belligerent student who opposed nearly everything that he had tried to teach; Bushnell’s only praise of his teacher was that Taylor taught him to think for himself” (I, 121-2).

In this passage we discern the interplay of generations, of schools of thought, of worldviews, subtly but authoritatively adduced from competing understandings of the Word of God. We will see this rhythm of students learning from, challenging, and surpassing their mentors throughout the two-centuries-long saga of liberal theology in America.

Dorrien is particularly effective in comparing and contrasting ideas, thinkers, and movements. The theological earthquake at Harvard College in 1805, which precipitated the Unitarian controversy and the Unitarian movement, was in great measure reenacted in the soul of the young William Ellery Channing, torn between the divine judgment of Hopkinsian Calvinism and the moral sense philosophy of the Scottish realists. Channing resolved the tension by affirming, in Dorrien’s words, “the spiritual nature of consciousness” (I, 12) as displayed in Channing’s great sermon “Likeness to God.” Of interest is the fact that Samuel Hopkins and the Scottish realists both affirmed disinterested benevolence as an attribute of deity (I, 6,12). They differed markedly, however, in the theological implications of the phrase. For Hopkins, disinterested benevolence was the principle of divine inclusiveness: Christ died for the sins of all, not only for the elect. For Francis Hutcheson, disinterested benevolence was the principle of divine altruism: moral goodness is the fundamental attribute of God as Creator and of humankind as creature.

A parallel transformation was that which occurred at the Andover Theological Seminary later in the nineteenth century. Dorrien points out that for the old-guard conservatives, “progressive orthodoxy” was “a Trojan horse for liberalism” (I, 291). Established in 1808 as a counter force to Harvard after the election of Henry Ware, Andover Seminary was not immune to the appeal of biblical criticism or of the Arminian doctrine of liberty of conscience. The Andover liberals “pressed hard for a New Theology that made peace with modern science, especially evolutionary theory, and for continued progress in theology and society” (I, 292).

The process of liberalization was accelerated by Andover’s rural location 20 miles north of Boston, by the heavy hand of the “Andover Creed,” by conflicts within the faculty, including the Egbert Smyth heresy trial, and by the establishment of the Andover Review as an ecumenical journal (I, 292-3). In 1908-9 Andover reaffiliated with the Harvard Divinity School, short of a merger (see George H. Williams, ed., The Harvard Divinity School [Boston, 1954], 189-95). Evidences of the new arrangement included the establishment of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library in 1910 and the construction in Cambridge of Andover Hall, which opened in 1911 (195). In 1922 a proposal for closer affiliation between the schools was challenged in court by the Board of Visitors of the Andover Theological Seminary, and in 1925 the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts disallowed the plan. Harvard and Andover thereafter went their separate ways, the latter into a new affiliation that created (in 1931) the Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Mass. (206-11).

The third desideratum of a major constructive narrative work is that it tells its story in the context of institutional dynamics, national priorities, and world events. John Milton’s Areopagitica warned against “a fugitive and cloistered virtue” (James Luther Adams, Not Without Dust and Heat [Chicago, 1995], epigraph), and Adams himself in “a Faith for the Free” taught us that “the achievement of freedom in community requires the power of organization and the organization of power” (JLA, The Prophethood of All Believers, ed. George K. Beach [Boston, 1986], 55).

Dorrien is particularly skilled in setting the social/economic/political/ ethical context of the events and movements he recounts. His history begins in the extended revolutionary moment in late eighteenth century when the American war of independence, the establishment of the United States of America, the industrial Revolution in England, and the storming of the Bastille, effecting the overthrow of monarchy and aristocracy in France, gave form to a new Atlantic world. These events paralleled intellectual tectonic shifts identified with Hume, Kant, and Hegel in philosophy, Priestley and Lavoisier in chemistry, Schleiermacher in theology, Buckminster in biblical criticism, and Lamennais in social theory, to name but a few among many. The seedtime of American religious liberalism was punctuated by cataclysmic social and political change as well as cascading revolutions in the life of the mind. One could conjecture that if liberal theology had not arisen naturally in the form of New England Unitarianism, it would have to have been invented in order to accommodate the form-bursting and form-creating energies in play in Europe and America in the aftermath of the enlightenment, the industrial Revolution, and the democratic revolutions.

Three examples, one in each volume, give evidence of Dorrien’s context-setting power.

Horace Bushnell, a Congregational minister whom Dorrien deems “the theological father of mainstream American liberal Protestantism” (I, 111), began life modestly. A late-blooming son of a family of carders and weavers in rural Connecticut, he found himself converted to a life of righteousness and enrolled at Yale Divinity School. Bushnell was an evangelical Christian, but he possessed many of the qualities of a religious liberal, including a critical mind, ego strength, and a natural gift for the spoken word. His interest in language became one of the sources of his power. Viewing nature as “a type or figure of God’s mind,” he held that every individual is, like himself, “embosomed in the intelligence of God” (I, 125). This insight became the fulcrum of his best-known book, Discourses on Christian Nurture (1847) in which he argued that “children should grow up as Christians and never know themselves as anything else” (I, 135).

Walter Rauschenbusch, the scion of five generations of university-trained Lutheran pastors, created his own professional milieu by studying at a gymnasium in Westphalia, by attending the Rochester theological Seminary, a Baptist institution, upon the recommendation of his father, a Lutheran convert to the Baptist faith, and establishing his progressive orthodox faith in the theology of the social gospel (II, 76, 77, 83). His best-known books are Christianizing the Social Order (1912) and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). Rauschenbusch died in the final year of the First World War, convinced that “the energy of God realizing itself in human life” (II, 127) would sustain and redeem the human venture through all of its vicissitudes, including total war.

As Bushnell is the protagonist of Dorrien’s first volume, Rauschenbusch is the protagonist of his second volume. Reinhold Niebuhr, who lived from 1892 to 1971, bridges Dorrien’s second and third volumes. Because of his German background, Niebuhr’s life in some ways parallels Rauschenbusch’s. incidentally, Dorrien’s context-setting prowess is fully on display in his introduction to Niebuhr’s towering theological career (II, 436-48).

My choice for protagonist of Dorrien’s final volume may surprise you. it is Charles Hartshorne, the american philosopher of religion who, in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, inspired and informed the Whitehead renaissance at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Here again, Dorrien proves himself an accomplished context-setter.

Hartshorne’s early life is not recounted by the author, who, however, states that Hartshorne “described his family life as warmly supportive, a bit too tradi- tional for him creedally, and attractively pious.” in short, Dorrien adds, “it was not by alienation or anguished struggle that he [Hartshorne] came to his interest in religious questions.” Hartshorne studied with Rufus Jones at Haverford and with Hocking and Perry at Harvard. His Harvard dissertation, “the Unity of Being,” under C.i. Lewis, “made an argument for the unity of all things under God’s developing being.” Royce and Bergson were also influential in shaping Hartshorne’s worldview (III, 69). Hartshorne served as Whitehead’s teaching assistant at Harvard in 1925, devoting his free time to studying the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (III, 69-70).

When Harvard failed to offer Hartshorne a faculty position, he in 1928 accepted an appointment at the University of Chicago, where American pragmatism was the reigning philosophy. George Herbert Mead, James Tufts, T.V. Smith, and Edwin Burtt were among his Chicago colleagues. Hartshorne later said that “his favorite philosophers were all mathematicians (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Peirce, and Whitehead) and he was not” (III, 71). Eventually Hartshorne held a joint appointment in the philosophy department and in the Federated theological Faculty (III, 73). One of Hartshorne’s doctoral students was Bernard M. Loomer (III, 73-76), who was my professor of theology at Chicago in 1953-54.

Hartshorne affirmed an “absolute-relative panentheism in which God was conceived as being perfect in some respects and not in others . . . ” “Divinity means the sharing of suffering, not the privilege of escaping it,” Hartshorne argued (III, 73; for the author’s analysis of Whitehead’s “dipolar theism” see 77-86). Two statements by Dorrien complete this part of my paper. “Fundamentally,” he writes, “liberal theology is the idea of a Christian perspective based on reason and experience, not external authority” (III, 2). And, “The major tradition of recent theological liberalism [is] Whiteheadian process thought . . . ” (III, 7; see also 190), a movement of which Charles Hartshorne is by all-but-universal consensus the foremost exemplar and interpreter.

As Unitarian Universalists we take satisfaction in the fact that the making of American liberal theology began with our liberal-minded Puritan forebears in New England — Charles Chauncy, Ebenezer Gay, Jonathan Mayhew, Henry Ware, and others — who contested the Calvinist monopoly on sin and grace in the churches of the Standing Order, advocating a more open, rational, and benevolent principle of faith congruent with the values of the enlightenment as well as with those of the Protestant Reformation.

The rise of transcendentalism within the Unitarian orbit adds heft and specificity to American liberal theology’s claim to be the true successor to New England Puritanism.

The Chicago school of theology centered at the new University of Chicago attracted Unitarian students for summer courses starting in 1900, and, after 1926, when the Meadville theological School relocated from northwestern Pennsylvania to the south side of Chicago, on a full-time basis. the empirical theology of George Burman Foster, Shailer Mathews, and Shirley Jackson Case was entirely congruent with the historic affirmations of Unitarianism (II, ch. 3).

In the aftermath of the neo-orthodox revolt against liberal theology, no one knew what the new shape of American liberal theology was to be. The personalist wing of American Protestantism, centered at Boston University under the inspiration of Borden Parker Bowne, lost momentum after the death of Edgar S. Brightman, Bowne’s foremost disciple, in 1953. Theology at the Harvard Divinity School, exemplified early in the century by the experiential theism of William Wallace Fenn (see WWF, Theism: The Implication of Experience, ed. Dan Huntington Fenn [Peterborough, NH, 1969]), veered toward the humanist position in the 1940s and 1950s when the Parkman professor of theology was Dr. J.A.C.F. Auer, a theological humanist (see George H. Williams, ed., The Harvard Divinity School [Boston, 1954], 225). Although larger than ever before, with a significant number of fundamentalist ministers studying for low-tuition Harvard Ph.D.s, the Divinity School was not keeping pace with other graduate divisions of the university, and serious questions were being raised about its continued viability or even survival.

The arrival at the University of Chicago Divinity School of Henry Nelson Wieman in 1927 (II, 261) constituted the spark that produced the most significant American theological movement of the twentieth century, namely process theology, rising on the foundation of Alfred North Whitehead’s organicist metaphysics. With Wieman at the Divinity School and Hartshorne in the philosophy department, the stage was set at Chicago for a new, generative, horizon-stretching empirical theology that extended far beyond the parameters contemplated by Mathews and Case in the previous generation.

Dorrien’s chapters on process thought (II, ch. 4; III, ch. 2, 4-8) constitute a great adventure of the mind. In these pages, American liberal theology takes flight. Although I did not arrive in Chicago until 1952, in my theology classes with Bernard Loomer I found myself present at the creation of a new theological paradigm that now, half a century later, continues to bear fruit in liberationist theology, feminist theology, interfaith theology, world theology, and cognate fields of study (III, 7-8).

In the post-transcendentalist period, the most significant Unitarian Universalist presence in Dorrien’s pages is that of our beloved James Luther Adams. Thandeka, Forrest Church, John Hayward, Bill Jones, Gene Reeves, and one or two others make brief appearances. Also, we may add, Henry Nelson Wieman, Charles Hartshorne, and Bernard Loomer, each of whom became a Unitarian Universalist by conviction and affiliation in adult life, uphold the flame of our Unitarian Universalist vision through their intellectual labors.

An eye-opening dimension for me is Dorrien’s discussion of feminist theology. i attended the Harvard Divinity School/Center for Process Studies conference on feminism and process thought in 1978 and heard Valerie Saiving, Sheila Greeve Davaney, and others cast their vision as theologically-committed women. It was inspiring. Saiving, Davaney, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Marjorie Hewett Suchocki, Sallie McFague, Anne Carr, Mary Daly, Elizabeth Johnson, Nancy Frankenberry, and Catherine Keller are superbly capable advocates of American liberal theology. It’s great to discover their leading ideas and to learn of their eminence in the field. These women stand on the shoulders of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (I, 214), Vida Scudder (II, 128), Georgia Harkness (II, 390), and other women pioneers.

I note that three women theologians, Ruether, Daly, and Keller, and probably others, are published by the Beacon Press, our Unitarian Universalist publishing house. Bravo!

Likewise Dorrien’s illumination of African American Theology. I met Howard Thurman at Marsh Chapel in 1962. To learn in these pages of the contributions of Thurman, Benjamin E. Mays, J. Deotis Roberts, Peter Gomes, Rufus Barrow, Jr., and Thandeka, not to mention Martin Luther King, Jr., is to approach the history of American liberal theology in a new and dramatic way. (Regarding Dr. King’s contribution, see iii, 143-59; for another perspective on King’s theological formation see Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. [New York, 1994], 16-51.)

I have known of David Tracy for decades, but have not read his books. Dorrien’s treatment of Roman Catholic theological liberalism prompted me to order Blessed Rage for Order (1975) and The Analogical Imagination (1981).

Three major figures in this history are new to me: David Ray Griffin, Peter Hodgson, and Edward Farley. i thank the author for bringing them to my attention.

A final word. The depth, sweep, and richness of Gary Dorrien’s intellectual history places before us a sumptuous feast of ideas and ideals. it is a joy to pick up these volumes, to engage with them, and to lay them down — touched, edified, and uplifted.