The GOSPEL TRUTH

A GENETIC HISTORY OF THE

NEW ENGLAND THEOLOGY

By

FRANK HUGH FOSTER

1907

 

 CONCLUSION

We have now traced the rise, course, and culmination of New England theology as a distinct school of thought. But nothing is more remarkable about it than its collapse. At the beginning of the year 1880 it was in control of all of the theological seminaries of the Congregational denomination, with possibly a single exception, and of some of the Presbyterian. At Andover the chair of theology was occupied by Park, at Yale by Harris, at Oberlin by Fairchild, at Chicago by Boardman. Fifteen years later these teachers had all been replaced, and in no case by a man who could be considered as belonging to the New England school. It had endured more than 150 years; it had become dominant in a great ecclesiastical denomination; it had founded every Congregational seminary; and, as it were, in a night, it perished from off the face of the earth. For this remarkable and almost unprecedented phenomenon there must be some instructive explanation.

In this concluding chapter, therefore, we retrace our steps from the beginning, in the effort to gain that wider understanding of our history which the multitude of details may have hindered us from gaining hitherto, and which shall disclose to us the secret of its fateful termination.

The history of Calvinism presents to the historical student, and presented to the slowly awakening consciousness of our fathers as they themselves lived through a portion of it, a mighty indictment against the system. It seemed in its beginning, when men felt themselves the elect of God and predestined to the pulling-down of strongholds, a powerful incentive to faith and activity. It hurled the scanty forces of a half-drowned Holland against the mightiest empire of the day in the Eighty Years' War, and gave them victory. It tore at the same time an empire from the grasp of Austria. It elevated England to the position of the leading European power. It created English freedom. This was all upon a great scale; but it could also fire the hearts of the humble and enable them to effect great things, and had forever laid its claim to the grateful appreciation of America when it created out of the peasants of Scrooby and Bawtry in Yorkshire a church which had the energy to face exile and the unknown dangers of a new continent for their faith's sake. Thus activity might seem to be of its very essence. But experience in the new land, as well as elsewhere, had shown that this was not so. It so conceived the sovereignty of God and so obscured human freedom that it exercised, when operating in any locality undisturbed for a long period, a paralyzing effect upon human initiative. Assisted, as this effect was in New England, by the influences of a frontier situation, it proved well-nigh fatal to the churches. Theology was gradually strangling life. This was the more so because, again, the system proved itself to be non-ethical, laying stress upon the external, and not encouraging--sometimes discouraging--attention to the inner meaning of spiritual processes, making holiness a state, entered into by justification consequent upon an experience essentially mysterious--faith--and consisting in an attitude of the soul and not in its activities. What was holiness in itself? The system had no answer. What were the virtues? Temperance, meekness, love, etc., said the system. Why was temperance a virtue, and by what law were its demands to be formulated and interpreted? There was no answer. How shall I live a holy life? Do this, that, and the other thing, replied the system. Thus all was external; not so much so as Rome had made it, for faith was still emphasized, and in some way souls whom God had touched still found their way to personal, face-to-face communion with him. The soul could not pass from the cradle to the grave without an inquiry as to its real possession of grace, as it could in the old church; but under forensic justification and the "imputation" to a man of both sin and righteousness which were not his, his salvation was in great danger of being a thing in which, however great his concern, his part was little or nothing. The indictment was that the system was injurious to practical religion.

This indictment was reinforced by the tendencies of the times. New forces were entering into the thought of the world and of the New World across the Atlantic, during the century in which Calvinism was on its trial there, and was getting its sentence. In 1637 Descartes had introduced the appeal to consciousness into modern philosophy, and under Locke (1632-1704) it had become domiciled in all English thinking. Consciousness had given a new doctrine of freedom, as we have traced in the pages of Locke himself, which was destined to become more and more clamorous till it got a real recognition from leading thinkers. A new religious experience had come in, manifesting itself in world-wide revivals beginning with Edwards in America and with Wesley in England. Gradually a new ethical sense, and a great vision of the true meaning of virtue and holiness, had dawned upon the philosophic and religious mind. And, above all, the new method of dealing with the objects of thinking, introduced by the long neglected treatise of Francis Bacon (1620), the inductive, the exact antithesis of the characteristic method of Calvinism, had received a powerful impulse from the work of Sir Isaac Newton (1672, etc.), and was soon (1778) to show its importance in the epoch-making discoveries of Lavoisier. All this ferment of thought meant much more for Calvinism and for religion than the protest of Arminianism had meant, though at first it took the direction of assisting the Arminian movement onward. It meant in New England a thoroughgoing criticism of the system and its essential modification.

The study of the history just completed has shown us what New England attempted to do. Seizing upon these new instruments of thought, the Fathers sought to restate the old theology in such a way as to obviate objections and yet maintain it in all its great central positions. The correctness of Calvinism in general was not questioned. It seemed so clearly the meaning of the Scriptures, and their religious experience so thoroughly sustained its leading principles, especially its great determining principle, the sovereignty of God; it was, further, to so large an extent the common conviction of the Protestant theological world, that they did not suspect that perhaps these new principles of thinking might lead really away from Calvinism to something quite different. Radical as the positions of some of our divines were, they always seemed to themselves conservative. They were defending--in a new way, possibly, but still defending--the old system. Till near the last they all clung to Westminster as they clung to Edwards. To make the old armor still more impervious and still more efficient was their purpose and their hope.

Incidentally they effected some great things--to which it will be best that we turn before we pass to the greater question of their ultimate success. The conservative tendency led at first to the denial of the freedom of the will by Edwards. Still in him even the tendency of the day toward a real freedom was so strong that he gave man practically a much larger freedom than his theory allowed. The new principle of consciousness, the more it was consulted, spake the more clearly for freedom; and hence the school went on, by very gradual steps, and with many a digression, but steadily, toward a better doctrine, till it met with a certain check, upon which it paused, hesitated, and fell back into the old Edwardean determinism. They also ascribed a real character to God in teaching that his moral attributes were comprised in love, which was a choice, and a choice of something which we can understand, viz., the highest good of all sentient being. God was thus made an intelligible and imitable being, and taken at this vital point out of that realm of mystery which may favor a certain kind of rapture on the part of devotees, but is fatal to a rational and enduring piety. Probably no service that the school rendered surpassed this in importance. To uproot that whole view of God which spoke of his arbitrary will as if it might effect anything, and culminated in affirming that even the distinction of right and wrong depended upon the divine fiat, and to construct our idea of God from the nature of man whom God had made in his own image, was vital to the maintenance of religion. For religion is at bottom communion with God; and we cannot commune with a being totally unlike ourselves, and who might have made us the exact opposite of what we are. They thus ethicized theology, and threw a flood of light upon the nature of faith, regeneration, conversion, justification, prayer, the divine government, and the atonement. They necessarily broke down thereby the forensic system of Calvinism and introduced a new era of practical activity in the church. Thus Edwards was the greatest evangelist whom New England had ever known; Hopkins first suggested foreign missions, the direct result of his work being that current of interest which produced the hay-stack prayer-meetings and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Woods, a Hopkinsian, formed Andover Seminary; the New England ministers became the founders of that wonderful belt of colleges, Marietta, Oberlin, Olivet, Illinois, Beloit, Iowa, Tabor, etc., etc., and of that chain of churches of the Congregational order, which now extend from Albany to San Francisco. Whatever else the school did or failed to do, it made it necessary that the theology which should replace it should be primarily ethical, both in its doctrine of man and of God.

Another such service which the school rendered was in preparing the way for a comparatively peaceful and easy transition to the new order of things when new tendencies of thought came in to dominate the mind. Whether competent itself to serve the new age or not, it made the way open for some other one to serve it. It had familiarized the New England mind with the idea of theological modification; and men could hence believe that in the strange proposals of Darwinism there might, after all, be some germs of improvement. When the storms of biblical criticism burst upon the American world, there was genuine panic in denominations which had been trained under a less liberal system; but Congregationalism, especially when it had been taught by Park to lay stress upon the religious contents of the Bible in distinction from its outward form, could await with great patience for the outcome of the scholarly investigations of trusted leaders, and could even afford a refuge to scholars from its Presbyterian daughter church, like H. P. Smith, till the stress of persecution should be overblown. With its elastic system of maintaining orthodoxy, it could waive for a time insistence upon points of doctrine as to which there was actual question among competent thinkers, and emphasize essentials. While at the present writing (1906) the outcome is by no means clear, and the "new theology" of this day is still quite nebulous, it may fairly be said that Congregationalism is in a state of theological peace, and that its doctrinal discussions have not seriously affected its practical efficiency in the nation or in the world. The temper of mind which has produced this happy condition of affairs, and the denominational atmosphere which has rendered it possible, are the gifts to the new time of the school of thought which has now passed from view.

All these are wonderful achievements, upon which it would be a happy lot if one were permitted to expatiate. But the theme presses to the answer of the question: Was the school crowned with a real success upon the largest scale? Was its theology, were its distinctive theories, its systematizing principles, of permanent value? Or did its collapse, so sudden, and so complete, prove that it had failed, and was essentially incapable of propagating itself?

We must reply (1) that it failed when it sacrificed freedom to the Calvinism of the old system. Calvinism exalts the sole causality of God; and New England theology found a scheme of determinism essential to the maintenance of that causality. It felt the force of the argument from consciousness for freedom; and that argument almost carried the day. But to save the Calvinism, at last the word went forth for determinism; and when the new theology uttered this fiat, it pronounced at the same time its own judgment. Determinism belongs with materialism. The church was moving onward to a conflict such as it had never seen, with materialism in philosophy and with the materialistic spirit in practical life. On the one side stood the theory that the body is the man; that there is no soul, but all his thoughts and passions and purposes are the fruit of his brain; that, therefore, every human phenomenon stands under the strict law of cause and effect. Every deterministic theology is the unconscious ally of this theory. On the other side stood Christianity, teaching that man is an immortal and spiritual being, possessing a body as the organ of impressions and of activities, and possessed of personality and freedom as his inalienable characteristics. The Christian church knew it needed a philosophy which could sustain this position. It needed a clear doctrine of freedom, practical and theoretical. When New England theology refused to give it such a doctrine, the church turned away from it. The church also turned away from the other survivals of an a priori conception of God, from the contradiction with the theory of virtue and with the ethical conception of God which lay in the idea of God's unchangeableness, absolute foreknowledge and absolute decrees, etc. The drift of all the vital new thoughts was away from Calvinism; but New England theology still professed to be, and was, Calvinistic. This was its condemnation.

(2) This trouble lay in the a priori character of much of the reasoning with which the system was still defended. Never was a theologian more determined to pursue the a posteriori method than Park; but even he had a priori suppositions upon these topics which infected his system. The theology had not fully grasped the meaning of the inductive method, because it did not yet know what it means to obtain the facts upon which an induction can be based. It had no conception of such processes of research as those by which Darwin got at the facts upon which he founded his theory of evolution. Its failure to appreciate Darwinism largely flowed from its failure to understand how comprehensive and thorough his experiments had been. However hospitable some of the leaders, like Park, were to all new ideas, and however careful to clear the way for any future prevalence of Darwinism, still the system was too fully committed to a multitude of presuppositions, such as the special creation of each human soul, and the entire separation of humanity from the animal world in dignity and meaning, to be able to survive the triumph of evolution as a philosophy of man and of life. It made its children able to sit down to the patient investigations that lay before them in sociology, psychology, and nature; this was its immortal service. But it had not itself entered into, the new inheritance.

Neither did it succeed (3) in answering fully the questions put it within its own circle as to the central doctrines of the Christian system. The Unitarian questionings were not met, but the evangelical doctrines carried by a tour de force, by a mere appeal to authority; and at the same time they were depotentiated in the interest of a partial answer to these questionings. It was no wonder, then, that the "new theology" of 1880 on depontentiated the Trinity still further, inclined away from a true incarnation, and preserved only the shadow of an objective atonement. If these tendencies were to be made a cause of reproach to anybody, that reproach must fall primarily upon our elder new theology. Its failure to get any satisfactory answer to the objections to the doctrine of depravity, its reference of the corruption of human nature to a "divine constitution," its blindness to the help offered it in its last days by the Darwinian doctrine of heredity, further accelerated the day of its own rejection. A theology which resorted for the defense of the most important Christian doctrines to an ipse dixit, even if this self-contained and unanswering authority were that of the Bible, was thereby condemned--yes, self-condemned, since its great principle and the driving force of its long theological labors had been that whatever was biblical was therefore rational.

Hence there were three things in particular which it was a pressing necessity that New England theology should do:

1. Abandon the Calvinistic conception and use of the sovereignty of God in favor of a new recognition of the facts of human nature.

2. Readjust itself to an evolutionary view of revelation and of human history.

3. Introduce the new idea of a living, and not an abstract, God into its Christology.

As a practical fact, the leaders of this theology were unable to do these things. When their successors came into our theological chairs, they found they could not do their manifest professional duty and make use of their predecessors' labors. It was necessary to begin again. Just as the old exegesis was antiquated by a new point of view of all theological themes, the old theology was also antiquated. So far as the theology built upon the old at all, it was involved in vagueness and confusion. Even such leaders as Samuel Harris, who were themselves substantially upon the New England basis, felt compelled to build their identical theology upon other foundations and with other instruments. The pupils of Harris took the new foundations, and newer still, and built something which was also new. And thus New England theology perished from the earth.

Perished, at any rate, for the time. The questions of the present hour are still more fundamental than those with which New England theology or its immediate successors have had to concern themselves. A ringing call is sounding through the air to face the true issue, the reality of God's supernatural interference in the history of man versus the universal reign of unmodified law. The question is not whether the old evangelical scheme needs some adjustments to adapt it to our present knowledge, but whether its most fundamental conception, the very idea of the gospel, is true. A religion founded upon God's self-revelation of himself, or a pure rationalism by which truth in religion is attained as it is in physics, or any other realm of knowledge--these are the antitheses. Before this all the half-way compromises of the present day must be given up. Men must take sides. They must be for the gospel or against it. Evasions as to the reality of the evangelical miracles must be abandoned. Criticism which renders every individual lineament of the portrait of Christ uncertain must put an end to its indefiniteness and either give us a Christ, or, confessing that it knows nothing reliable about him, must attempt the fomulation of a theology which has no Christ except as it has a Socrates and a Confucius, if it can.

What the future may hold, no eye of man can discern. But if this great contest be decided in favor of the evangelical theology, then the fundamental distinctions by which the New England Fathers sought to define the holiness of God and bring the virtue of man into harmony and likeness with it, their emphasis upon the work of Christ, their better conception of the freedom and activity of man, will no doubt receive renewed attention. If the interval shall have sufficed to break certain illusions which they cherished, it will not have occurred in vain. The future evangelical theology even of New England will not be "the New England theology," but to it that theology will then be found to have contributed some of its most important principles.

"Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit."

 

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