Download STUDY OF RELIGION HANDOUT, PART II: 1860

STUDY OF RELIGION HANDOUT, PART II: 1860-1960s
Prof. Daniel Alvarez, Florida International University
The last handout covered the period from 1800-1860. There I emphasized the rise
of historical criticism and theological liberalism by reviewing the work and contribution of
Schleiermacher, de Wette, Strauss, Baur, Wellhausen, the great successor to de Wette in the
field of Old Testament studies, and Troeltsch (the bridge between 19th and 20th century
developments). I also touched on the conservative reaction of Hengstenberg, who
spearheaded the conservative movement in Germany from his appointment in 1827 as
Professor of Old Testament at the University of Berlin (in fact, occupying the chair left
vacant by de Wette in 1819) to his death in 1866. Before I proceed to discuss post-1860
developments in greater detail, it is necessary to deal with aspects of the conservative
reaction to liberalism not only in Protestant Germany, America, and England, but in the
world of Roman Catholicism as well.
DEVELOPMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES
America was (and remains) largely a conservative nation theologically as a result of
successive waves of “revivals” that have kept it squarely in the Puritan world of thought and
sensibilities since 1740, the year the first “Great Awakening” began under Jonathan Edwards
and George Whitefield. In fact, one can best understand the American religious experience
in terms of five of these awakenings (1740-41, 1800-1830 with Charles G. Finney, 1890-1910
with Dwight L. Moody, 1950-1960 with Billy Graham, with the fifth perhaps in the making
since the 1980s). The Enlightenment was felt in America only at the end of the 18 th century,
during the revolutionary years, under the influence of Benjamin Franklin, James Madison,
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, and Elihu Palmer, to name the
most prominent names.1 However, the New England or Edwardean theology (from Jonathan
Edwards) dominanted the colonies and then the young nation arguably for an entire century
until the 1840s (Nathanael Emmons, the last of the Edwardeans, died in 1840)2, and this
theology was conservative, Calvinist, bible (i.e. the Bible as the inerrant word of God), and
confessional (based on the great Protestant confessions of the 17th century, Lutheran and
Calvinist). Whenever America has drifted too far from its Puritan roots, the awakenings
have served to bring America back to the fold. The Enlightenment took hold only among
1
It is ironic that it was the Baptists, led by Isaac Backus, who influenced Madison
and Jefferson in their doctrine of the separation of church and state, not only liberal
Enlightenment ideas about government derived from Locke and Montesquieu (cf. Isaac
Backus’ papers, collected and published by William McLoughlin, and Backus’ History of New
England with Particular Reference to the Denominations of Christians Called Baptists (3 volumes, 17771796, 2nd edition, 2 volumes, 1871). Except for their liberal view about church-state
relations, the Southern Baptists today have taken a sharp turn to the right in politics and
religion (with the Northern Baptists representing a liberal branch of the Baptist family in the
United States).
2
Although others like Samuel Miller (Princeton), Leonard Woods, Moses Stuart,
Bennett Tyler, Edwards Amasa Park, and Leonard Bacon (all of or formed at Andover
Theological Seminary) continued to defend a version of Edwardean theology well into the
1890s. Such was the influence of Edwards.
the educated elite of New England and never among the masses of the people, a fact that
continues to shape political and religious sensibilities until our day. Only when the Unitarian
(followed by the more radical Transcendentalist) movement began to be felt in earnest after
1806, did Enlightenment influences, both philosophically and theologically (and of course
politically), become part of the debate, and only then among the educated and the
universities. The Unitarians, as the names implies, rejected the dogma of the trinity, the
deity (Godhood) of Jesus of Nazareth, and insisted that the Bible be studied by the same
rules that apply to any other book.3 Harvard went Unitarian early (1806-1811) but Unitarian
sent their sons to Germany to study with the likes of Schleiermacher and de Wette.4 The
“new wine” of the Germans was most effective with the Transcendentalists; Ralph Waldo
Emerson (d. 1882) and Theodore Parker (d. 1860) in particular moved to the most critically
advanced (Parker) and radical (Emerson) conceptions in America.5 Soon conservatives,
aware of the linguistic, philosophical, and theological prowess of the Unitarians directly
trained or influenced by German scholars, decided that to compete they themselves needed
to send their young to Germany as well, but to study with the likes of Hengstenberg,
3
Cf. William Ellery Channing (d. 1842), “Unitarian Christianity” (his “Baltimore
Sermon” of 1819), considered the manifesto of Unitarianism. This sermon formally started
the “Unitarian Controversy” that raged in the early 1820s. The Unitarians (and
Transcendentalists) were to introduce America to de Wette and other German liberals.
4
In 1806 the Unitarian Henry Ware, Sr. (d. 1845), was appointed to teach theology at
Harvard, where he was later succeeded by his son, Henry Ware, Jr.; Andrews Norton (d.
1853), another Unitarian and New Testament scholar, also joined the faculty shortly
thereafter. In 1825 New England was shaken by the “Unitarian defection,” when hundreds
(125 to be exact) of Congregational (Trinitarian) churches became Unitarian overnight.
Andrews Norton wrote a famous critique of Trinitarianism in 1819, expanded into a book in
1833, A Statement of Reasons Against the Trinitarians; and Henry Ware, Sr., carried on a lengthy
debate, in the form of letters, with Leonard Woods (of the newly founded Andover
Seminary) in the early 1820s; and Moses Stuart (Andover) and Samuel Miller (Princeton) also
wrote “letters” against the Unitarians in the same period. How well prepared by German
scholarship were the likes of Buckminster, Everett, Norton, and then Parker, all Unitarians
and the first three professors at Harvard, can be appreciated from Jerry W. Brown, The Rise
of Biblical Criticism in America: 1800-1870 (1969).
5
Cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address” (1838), and Theodore
Parker, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity (1841), both in H. Shelton Smith,
et al., editors, American Christianity: A Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents
(1963), Volume 2. In 1842 Parker pubished A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, which
is significant by, among other things, how deeply the influence of the German historical
criticism of de Wette and Strauss can be felt in its pages. In the same year he published his
(much expanded and not always accurate) translation of de Wette’s Introduction to the Canonical
Scriptures of the Old Testament. It can be said with justice that the Unitarians and
Transcendentalists not only introduced German historical criticism to America fifty years
before America was ready to receive it, but that they understood the implications of this
criticism for Christian theology and for the phenomenom of religion, now understood (at
least by Emerson) in a comparative or history of religions sense.
2
Tholuck, Neander, who competed with the liberals on their terms. Charles Hodge,
professor at Princeton Theological Seminary from the 1820s until his death in 1878, pursued
studies at Berlin, but was naturally drawn to Hengstenberg and his circle.6 One can think of
the Charles Hodge as the Hengstenberg of the United States, although Hodge is more
oriented to the biblicism (Bible=inerrant Word of God) of 17th century orthodoxy (as
classically represented by Francis Turretin in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, a work whose
translation Hodge himself comissioned, and on which Hodge is clearly dependent—and
from which he quotes liberally—in his Systematic Theology, published in the 1870s).
Revivalism and the Princeton theology effectively delayed the acceptance of liberal and
higher critical (historical-critical) views in the United States until the 1890s.
DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLAND, GERMANY, AND THE CONTINENT
Although England had been at the forefront of theological radicalism and criticism
since the 1660s and particularly during the first half of the 18th century, it went into a long
period of hybernation from the 1750s until literally the 1860s. In the works of John Toland
(Christianity not Mysterious, 1696), Matthew Tindal (Christianity as Old as Creation, 1730); and in
the numerous works of Anthony Collins (Discourse on Free Thinking, 1724), Thomas Woolston
(Discourses on the Miracles of our Savior, 1727-30), Thomas Morgan (The Moral Philosopher, 173840), and Thomas Chubb (A Discourse Concerning Reason, 1731), the Deist movement launched
an all-out assault on traditional or orthodox Christianity. Miracles, the historicity of the
Biblical narratives, Moses’ authorship of the Torah, the birth narratives of Jesus and his
supernatural birth, were sharply criticized; contradictions and discrepancies pointed out,
challenging the inerrancy of the Bible, often with sarcasm and bitter ridicule. But despite
some brilliant insights and specific criticisms that anticipated the systematic work of German
critics like de Wette, Strauss, and Baur, their criticisms were too piecemeal and lacked the
comprehensive grasp of the issues that were to distinguish the work of the German critics of
the 19th century. More importantly, the British Deists did not work with the original
languages, and hence their work does not have the academic rigor of the German critics.
Compared with the latter, their work has an amateurish, dilettante flavor that dramatically
exposed its limitations and weaknesses.7
The critique arising out of the Enlightenment became more radical as it sought to
relativize Christianity (and religion in general) and assimilate it to the mythologies of the
ancients, as we find in Fontenelle’s History of the Oracles (1686) and Origin of the Fables (169099, published in 1724). Pierre Bayle’s Critical Historical Dictionary (1696-97, 5th edition, 1740),
Baron D’Holbach, Helvetius, Condillac, la Mettrie, Voltaire , Buffon, N. A. Boulanger,
6
It is clear from perusing Hodge’s monumental Systematic Theology (1871-73) and his
Commentary on Romans (1835; revised and enlarged, 1866) that Hodge is keenly aware of
liberals views. The same can be said about his younger contemporaries, William G. T. Shedd
(Dogmatic Theology, 1889) and Hodge’s own son and successor, A. A. Hodge (Outlines of
Theology, 1878). Modern-day evangelicals, with notable exceptions, do not have the same
grasp of the issues raised by Schleiermacher, et al., as did Hodge, Shedd, and the younger
Hodge, a point made brilliantly by Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and David
F. Wells in No Place for Truth, both published in 1994.
7
Cf. William Baird, History of New Testament Research (Volume One), 39-57.
3
Condorcet, (supported by David Hume’s Natural History of Religion [1757]and his devastating
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [1779]), and Charles François Dupuis’ Origins of all the
Cults (1795), continued their assault on religion and Christianity from an empiricist (Locke
and Hume) and materialist point of view (cf. Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts
the Gods [1959] and R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France [1939], Peter
Gay, The Enlightenment [2 volumes, 1969], and Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment
[1932]). The dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (d. 1781) Theological Writings (edited by
Chadwick, 1957) in particular, The Education of the Human Race, and Nathan the Wise, as well
Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s (d. 1768) Wolfenbüttel Fragments, published by Lessing between
1774 and 1778, proved to be prophetic of things to come in the 19th century. Reimarus,
influenced by the Pantheism and anti-supernaturalism of Spinoza (d. 1677), charged
Christianity with fraud (body of Jesus was stolen by the disciples, who fabricated the story of
the resurrection); and deception, when history itself proved that Christianity was based on a
falsehood: the second coming of Christ was predicted to take place at the time of the
apostles, not centuries or millennia later at some indefinite future. After this period of
intense criticism, the torch is passed to Germany.
England in the second half of the 18th century is now in the grip of its own “Great
Awakening,” led by John Wesley, his brothers, and a host of itinerant “Methodist” preachers
that brought a reinvigorated “Pietism”8 back into the mainstream of British life and
competed with Enlightenment ideas for the heart, if not the mind, of the nation. By the
1830s however, deep dissatisfaction with the Anglican (Church of England) Via Media
(“middle way” between the extremes of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, articulated
by the Elizabethan theologians such as John Jewel and Richard Hooker in the late 1500s) led
some theologians at Oxford to question the very foundations of the English religious
establishment. The most prominent critic of the Church was the priest John Henry
Newman (d. 1890), who in “Tract 90” of Tracts for the Times (from which the movement
derived its name, “Tractarians”) essentially assimilated to and interpreted the doctrines of the
Anglican Church in terms most consistent with Catholic dogma, the beliefs of the Christian
Church in the first five or six centuries (or, as Newman put it, the 39 Articles of the Church
of England, the doctrinal standard of the Church since the time of Queen Elizabeth [d.
1604], can or should be read in the most Catholic of senses).
The publication of the tracts was suppressed by the university and Newman
converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, concluding a distinguished career as a Protestant (or
at least, non-Catholic) theologian and church historian. In 1878 he was made Cardinal, a
distinction that has since become almost part of his name. Newman felt that Roman
Catholicism is the only effective antidote and corrective to liberalism (both theological and
political) and the corrosive effects of the Enlightenment, a move in which he was followed
in America by Orestes Brownson (d. 1876), a former Unitarian-TranscendentalistPresbyterian-Agnostic who for similar reasons converted to Catholicism.9 Two prominent
8
One must not ignore that Wesley’s convesion experience in 1738 had taken place at
a Moravian Brethren meeting (the same group that influenced Schleiermacher’s initiation into
religious experience).
9
In our century, Newman’s trajectory to Rome has been followed by Ronald Knox,
among others. Newman’s story of his conversion can be read in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua
4
Catholic intellectuals in France, Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821) and (Félicité Robert de)
Lamennais (d. 1854), articulated similar visions of a Western world united under the banner
and authority of the Catholic Church and the Pope in particular as the only hope for the
world (a position known in the literature as Ultramontanism, “beyond the alps,” toward
Rome). Neo-Pietism in Germany under Hengstenberg, Revivalism and the Princeton
theology in America, and a resurgent Roman Catholicism as the only hope against the forces
of infidelity (historical criticism, the Enlightenment, political liberalism, democratic
movements, separation of church and state, freedom of the press, religion, academic
freedom) together provided a formidable front against everything that Schleiermacher, et al.
had worked for since the turn of the century.
It is no surprise therefore that the triumph of liberalism came late, and it came only
to the universities, seminaries, and the intellectual elite in the main urban centers of Europe
and England, and the Northeast in the United States. The increasing conservatism (and
ultramontanism) of the Roman Catholic Church evident in these developments reached their
apogee and climax in the first Vatican council of 1871, which reasserted the Tridentine faith
(Council of Trent); at this council the dogma of Papal infallibility, despite opposition by
eminent Catholics, such as Newman, Lord Acton, and the church historians Karl Hefele,
and Joseph Dollinger, was defined and made an official dogma of the Church. These
developments were followed by Pious X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis condemning
“modernism” in 1907 (and by the “Oath against Modernism” in 1910, making the papal
encyclical binding for every Catholic teacher or cleric, and the rejection of Modernism in any
and every form mandatory), which culminated with the excommunication of the modernist
theologians Alfred Loisy (French) and George Tyrrell (British). It was not until the 1940s
under Pius XII that the Church allowed Catholic scholars to study the Bible using the tools
of historical criticism now commonplace in the liberal Protestant world. In a move quite
progressive for its time, the Church also allowed at the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of
evolution, provided that it was also accepted that God had at some point in the evolutionary
process put souls into two individuals who became the progenitors of the human race. It
was not until Vatican II that the Church self-consciously opened itself to “modern world,”
including ecumenism and a new, highly advanced stance toward Judaism, 10 Protestantism
(Protestant are now recognized as Christians and “separated brothers”), and the world
religions. With the papacy of John Paul II (1978-present) the interpretation of Vatican II is
in question by many conservative Catholic theologians, who read the document in its most
“conservative” (or as I have put it, “Vatican I-Trent”) sense.11
(1864), and Brownson’s in The Convert (1857), Knox’s in A Spiritual Aeneid, being an account of
journey to the Catholic faith (1918).
10
Now officially declaring that the Jews are not responsible for the death of Jesus,
and considering Judaism as a “parallel covenant” that is not abolished by the Christian
covenant in Jesus Christ (quoting Paul that the gifts and covenants of God are
“irrevocable”). How long this reading of Vatican II will last is not clear, anymore than what
many interpreters of the documents take to be a quite liberal and inclusive views toward the
great non-Christian religions.
11
The openness to the modern world advocated, at least on one reading, by Vatican
II encouraged a number of Catholic theologians in Europe and America to explore Biblical
5
Only with the publication in 1860 of Essays and Reviews, a collection of papers by
eminent Anglican theologians and university professors that expressed sympathy for
German critical views, did things begin to loosen up a bit in England. But the essays caused
a furor, quite a reflection of the state of religion and theology in England (the Essays were
published in the United States by the Unitarian Frederick Henry Hedge of Harvard), despite
the fact that, as sympathetic German reviewers noted, it is quite moderate, if not timid, in its
assessments and conclusions. In 1889 another collection of essays, Lux Mundi, and the
scandal caused by Bishop Colenso,12 who in a multi-volume and ponderous work on the
Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, published between 1862 and 1879, pretty much
confirmed for the English-speaking world the most devastating conclusions of the German
Biblical critics, again caused tremors in the evangelical world to a degree that it prepared
both England and America for the reception and final acceptance (again, in academic circles
almost exclusively) of German historical criticism.13 The work of Essays and Reviews and Lux
and dogmatic themes with the freedom, creativity, and critical spirit of their liberal
Protestant colleagues, and strongly reminiscent of the work of Loisy and Tyrrell in the late
19th and early 20th century. Although theologically conservative, in Latin America Gustavo
Gutierrez (Peru), Jon Sobrino (Colombia), Leonardo Boff (Brazil), Juan Luis Segundo
(Uruguay), and Enrique Dussel (Mexico), among others, articulated a “liberation theology,”
strongl influenced by Marx’s critique of capitalism, for Latin America and the Third World
that has shaken the Catholic world. In Europe, Hans Küng, Karl Rahner, Edward
Schillebecxk, among others, pushed the limits of Ecumenism, openness to the world
religions, theological reflection, and critical history. And in America, both male and female
Catholic theologians, such as Rosemary Ruether, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and Mary
Daly proferred compelling feminist interpretations of Christianity (Ruether and Fiorenza in
particular), and John Dominic Crossan, in his acclaimed The Historical Jesus (1991) critical
analysis of the historical Jesus that have dramatically expanded the horizons of Catholic
theology. But since the papacy of John Paul II, the ascendancy of conservatives like Joseph
Ratzinger (who succeeded John Paul II as Benedict XVI) and Opus Dei, the banishment of
Küng, Schillebecxk, and Boff, and the reaffirmation of the traditional view of the status of
women in the church, these developments are in jeopardy. It remains to be seen how far
Pope Francis can push what appears to be quite a liberal agenda that has raised eyebrows
both in the among many churchmen and lay people. It is clear, however, that post-Vatican
II Catholicism infused Roman Catholicism with a new spirit and attitude that led to greater
collegiality between Catholic and Protestant theologians, and to introduction and influence
of historical-critical methodology into the mainstream of intellectual Catholic life and
thought; whether this process is now irreversible, as it seemed only a few years ago, remains
to be seen.
12
Cf. John Rogerson, “John William Colenso,” chapter 16 of Old Testament Criticism in
the Nineteenth Century (1984), 220-237; and Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (2 volumes).
13
Although Darwin had published The Origin of the Species in 1859, the theological
world was in no position yet to assess the implications of that work for theology.
Evolutionary, naturalistic thinking had been a part of the Western consciousness since the
pre-Socratic philosophers (Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and materialism since at least
Democritus), but Greek naturalism had lain dormant until the Renaissance and the scientific
revolution that soon followed. Even with the scientific revolution of the 16 th and 17th
6
Mundi was accomplished in America by the translations by Unitarians and Transcendentalists
of German critical works as early as the 1830s; special credit goes to Theodore Parker for his
visionary appreciation of de Wette, clearly the favorite Biblical critic and theologian of the
Transcendentalists (much to de Wette’s own amusement since he was a trinitarian!).
CHRISTIANITY ENCOUNTERS THE WORLD RELIGIONS
While these developments were going on in the internal history of Protestantism in
the 19th century, other world historical movements were taking place simultaneously. The
most important of these movements, particularly in its relevance to the study of religion in
the West, has to do with the expansion of the British Empire into India and the Middle East.
British presence in these parts of the world, hitherto known through the West through travel
books written by explorers, adventurers, or, worse, a handful of zealous missionaries more
interested in caricature and ridicule than in objective description, now brought with them
missionaries in large numbers. Unlike previous centuries, when the interest or emphasis in
Christianity did not lie in spreading the Christian message throughout the world, the 19 th
century saw the rise of the missionary movement on a grand and organized scale. This
movement did not begin in the 19th century. Through the cycle of great revivals of religion14
centuries, it was the physical (materialistic), not the biological or evolutionary, thinking of the
Greeks that had the greatest immediate impact. With Lyell’s Principles of Geology early in the
century, serious doubts began to be cast upon the antiquity of the earth, and attention called
to the evidence of the fossil record. It is to the credit of the editors of Essays and Reviews that
the essay “On the Mosaic Cosmogony” by C. W. Goodwin, where he addresses the issues
with the Genesis record in the light of Lyell’s conclusions, was included. Darwin integrated
both Lyell’s investigations with the evolutionary thinking of the Greeks in a comprehensive
theory now backed by meticulous empirical observation. Only by the end of the 19th century
was the West in a position to absorb the impact of Darwin upon religion, an impact that the
conservative Christians saw, rightly, was inimical to a literal reading of the Genesis creation
record and to the “creation-according-to-its-kind” (Aristotelian) spectacles through which
this account had been read for almost two millennia—as evidenced by attacks on Darwin by
conservatives like Charles Hodge What is Darwinism (1874), and Thomas H. Huxley’s equally
impassioned apology for Darwin and evolutionary biology during the same period. Since
Hodge and The Fundamentals (1917), “refutations” of Darwinism by conservative Christians
continue to pour from the presses until our own day. It is quite ironic that Thomas Nagel,
an atheist and naturalistic-minded philosopher, published a critique of Darwinism in 2012
(Mind and Cosmos Why the Neo-Darwinian Materialist Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly
Wrong), to the delight of conservative Christian thinkers. The dissatisfaction with Scientific
Naturalism in some circles has grown dramatically since the 1980s.
14
I am referring to the Great Awakening in the American colonies in the 1740s, led
most prominently by George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards (in New England), Gilbert
Tennent and Jonathan Dickinson (in the Middle Colonies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania),
and Samuel Davies in the Southern Colonies (Kentucky). The best modern account of the
Great Awakening is by Edwin Scott Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (1957). An
older but still influential account is Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening (1842). John Wesley,
who experienced a powerful conversion experience in 1738, led an equally significant and
long-lasting in its effect revival in England. It is to this first of several “awakenings” that
7
that began in the 1740s and continued unabated for the next century and a half, in England,
Germany, and America, the desire of Christians in both of these nations to “fulfill the great
commission” of Matthew 28:20 (“go into all nations and make disciples, baptizing them in
the name of the father, the son, and of the holy spirit”) became the dominant emphasis of
Protestant Christianity, and particularly of Evangelical (Conservative) Christians in England
and America. Thousands of young men and women, like William Carey (India) and
Adoniram Judson (China) and in mid century, James Legge (China), flocked to foreign lands
with the message of salvation through Jesus Christ, determined to save the “heathen” for
eternal life and from the fires of hell and eternal damnation. At this time Bible Societies and
Foreign Mission Boards were founded to organize the work and support the missionaries
abroad, societies and organizations that still continue to support missionaries the world over.
However, these missionaries had to preach to populations who did not speak
English, and who possessed religious traditions comparable to Christianity in depth, breadth,
and antiquity; and Scriptures, theologians, and philosophers that matched or exceeded
anything that Christianity had produced in the last eighteen hundred years. This meant then
that native tongues had to be learned in order to preach and translate the Christian message,
and particularly the Bible, the key document in the Protestant understanding of the Christian
proclamation. In the apologetic task (i.e. defense of the faith against objections), Hindu,
Muslim, Confucian, Taoist Scriptures had to be understood in order to be refuted, and that
necessitated (especially for those gifted in languages, such as James Legge of China) the
translation of those Scriptures into English. Others, like H. H. Wilson, a businessman with
the East India Company but with a remarkable aptitude for Sanskrit, the language of India’s
sacred literature, found themselves becoming scholars and overnight sensations in the West
eager for knowledge from these exotic lands that were now British possessions. It is to
Wilson that we owe several studies of Hindu religion and sects, and translations of postClassical texts such as the Vishnu Puranas (1840), a central text for understanding the
development of the god Vishnu in sectarian Vaishnavism (the cult of Vishnu, as
distinguished from Saivaism, the cult of Shiva). In the same year, Eugene Bournouf,
professor of Sanskrit in France, published his translation of a fundamental text of the Bhakti
movement, the Bhagavata Purana. Legge’s translations of the Chinese Classics, and the
Analects of Confucius and the Tao te Ching (pronounced and now transliterated as Dao de Jing)
attributed to Lao Tzu, the great Taoist sage, in particular have stood the test of time. Soon
men like Wilson and Legge found themselves lecturing at Western universities, such as
Oxford and Cambridge, first as speakers and later as professors of comparative religions.
Coeval with the work of these pioneers was the foundations of Journals and Societies
devoted to the investigation and study of the religions and cultures of Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East.
the explosion of missionary activity owed its fundamental impulse. In Germany
“awakening” came later, in the early 19th century (1817 to be exact), with rise of Neo-Pietism
comparable to the older Pietism and Puritanism of England and America, but now much
more dogmatic (doctrinally or confessionally rigid) than the relaxed Pietism of the 17th
century that ultimately produced Schleiermacher, de Wette, and a host of other Biblical
critics. For information about these 19th century developments the student is encouraged to
consult Walter H. Conser, Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England,
and America, 1815-1866 (Mercer, 1984).
8
THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL
ANALYSIS OF RELIGION
It should added that the wealth of anthropological and ethnological data being
amassed at a prodigious rate and documented in a plethora of journals from universities and
research societies, together with Darwin’s theory of evolution (extended now to the
evolution of cultures), led to the creation of the academic disciplines of philology, ethnology,
folklore and mythology, anthropology, and sociology.15 It is apparent that one of the
founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, formulated his theory of religion (in The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life, 1912) on the basis of the accumulated information; and this same
information lies at the foundation of the anthropological work of E. B. Tylor (Primitive
Culture, 1871), Max Müller work on Sanskrit, including his translation of the Upanishads
(1880s), Jacob Grimm (Teutonic Mythology, 1854), James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890-1915),
and Freud’s Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontent, and Moses
and Monotheism, inter alia. It is this kind of comparative investigation of the religions that led
Troeltsch to adopt what he called the religionsgeschichtliche (“history-of-religions”) approach to
the study of religion, an approach that I emphasized in the first handout was already implicit
in the work of the young Tholuck(with his work on Islamic mysticism in the early 1820s),
Strauss (life of Jesus) and Baur (Paul and Christianity of the first two centuries), and certainly
in the work of Schleiermacher and Hegel, the last of whom lectured on the world religions in
1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831.
Although someone like Legge never gave up his assumption that Christianity was the
“only way,” he acknowledged, even while defending the absoluteness of Christianity, that
Confucius had anticipated the golden rule (“do unto others as you would have them do to
you”).16 Except for translation of the Qur’an into English by George Sales in 1734, nothing
15
The sociological study of religion and its implications for theology are explicitly
drawn out by Shailer Mathews in a number of works, whose interpretation of religion
achieves its maturest form in The Faith of Modernism (1924), the manifesto of the Modernist
movement in American theology. Other Modernists of the so-called Chicago School, all
influenced by sociology, and modern scientific naturalism: Roy Wood Sellars, Religion Coming
of Age (1928); The Next Step in Religion (1918), for example), and John Dewey’s naturalistic
pragmatism (including but not limited to Dewey’s A Common Faith, 1934) are Henry Nelson
Wieman, Bernard Loomer, and Bernard Meland. The strong antipathy between Modernists
and Fundamentalists in the 1920s and 30s was mutual. The influence of Alfred North
Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), a “process” and naturalistic interpretation of God, on
Wieman, Loomer, and Meland must also be mentioned. In this connection, Samuel
Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity (1920), and Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1927) must
be mentioned. An excellent analysis of these developments can be gleaned from the first
part of Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind (1969)
16
Legge’s comments can be read in his contribution to a series of papers defending
the Christian faith against “unbelief” collected, in ten volumes, as Living Papers Concerning
Christian Evidences, Doctrines, and Morals (Cincinnati: Cranston & Stowe, 1887). Critiques of
Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Islam, invidiously comparing these religions with
Christianity and therefore mostly dismissive or hostile, can be found in those volumes.
9
of worth was available in a Western language until the aforementioned efforts; and what was
known was invariably dismissive, caricature, misleading, or downright slanderous and
distorting. Even a brilliant, educated, and enlightened man such as James Mill, father of the
philosopher John Stuart Mill, and author of the great multi-volume History of India (ca.
1820s), spoke of the Hindu religion and its literature in the most disparaging and
condescending language. He wrote something to the effect that the entire wisdom of India
could be summarized in a few paragraphs and there is nothing there anywhere comparable
to Western philosophy and religion (and I am being charitable to Mill).
By the 1870s the triumph of the historical-critical methodology reviewed in the last
handout is now irreversible, something that Ernst Troeltsch takes for granted in his
important papers from 1898 to 192317; and the impetus the development of this
methodology gave to the comparative study of religion cannot be overestimated. The internal
developments discussed previously now come together with the external mentioned in the
foregoing to create a favorable atmosphere, almost by the necessity of the circumstances, for
the establishment of chairs of comparative religion at the major Western universities (we had
seen how Tholuck and even the conservative Hengstenberg had been trained as orientalists
[Arabic] in the first quarter of the 19th century!). Oxford brought Max Müller, an Englishspeaking German scholar with a mastery of Sanskrit, to Oxford, and soon commissioned
him edit a series of volumes (fifty in all when the project was completed in the early 20 th
century) containing scholarly translations of the Sacred Books of the East. For the first time the
English-speaking world had a collection of translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, the
Upanishads (translated by Müller himself), the Qur’an, the Tao te Ching, the Analects of
Confucius (both by Legge), the Gathas attributed to Zarathrusta (Zoroaster, the founder of
Zoroastrianism) presented without missionary or religious biases, and according to
methodological principles consistent with the new historical consciousness. It should be
added that lesser known but important writings, such as the great commentaries of the great
Hindu philosopher-theologians Sankara (9th century) and Ramanuja (11th century), the Laws
of Manu, and the like, were included in the series, giving the Western reader more complete
picture of the spiritual depth, vitality, and richness of the great non-Christian religions.
Great philosophical or literary figures in the 19th century, such as Schopenhauer,
Hegel, Nietzsche, Goethe had been impressed with the wisdom of the East quite early in the
century. In America the Transcendentalists Ralpha Waldo Emerson and James Freeman
Clarke, the author of the first book on world religions published in America (two volumes,
1871), had been impressed not only by the wisdom but the power and depth of Eastern
spirituality, with Emerson becoming in his mature years (post-1838) a pantheist himself (cf.
his “Nature” and the Harvard “Divinity School Address”). There was clearly no way back to
the time when Christianity could be taken for granted as the “absolute,” “final,” or “unique”
revelation from God to humankind. Internal and external historical developments had made
it impossible. As Troeltsch points out in his 1898 and later reiterates in his 1923 paper, the
arguments from prophecy, miracles, and the moral and spiritual superiority of Christianity
17
“Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology” (1898), “A Half Century of
Theology: A Review” (1908), “What does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” (1903) ;
“Religion and the Science of Religion” (1906); “The Significance of the Historical Existence
of Jesus for Faith” (1911), among others.
10
looked very vacuous and unpersuasive by the end of the 19th century. There were then, as
there are today, reactions to these developmens: Hengstenberg’s during the 1830s, which
effectively held at bay the progress of historical criticism in Germany until his death in 1866;
the rise of the Bible College movement in England but most prominently in America in
response to the liberalization of universities and theological schools (seminaries); the rise of
the Fundamentalist movement in America (early 1900s) determined, as it is still today, to
fight infidelity, liberalism, historical-critical methology, and naturalism which in their view
have led to a rejection of Christianity as the absolute truth and unique revelation from God.
But the reactions could not stem the tide.18
In 1893 the first World Parliament of Religions congress was held in Chicago. Eminent
representatives from the great world religions were in invited, but none was more impressive
or affected more deeply the subsequent course of the study of religion in the West than
Swami Vivekananda, an associate and disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, a Hindu mystic of renown
in India. Vivekananda gave an impassioned exposition of the Hindu view of life, based
primarily on the more philosophical and non-theistic Upanishads. By all accounts,
Vivekananda showed the West that India had spiritual traditions and resources that rivalled if
not exceeded anything that the Western Judeo-Christian tradition had to offer. India then
not only had nothing to envy in the West, but the West could use some of the insights and
methods for the attainment of spiritual renewal that India had to offer. It is in the last
decades of the 19th century that the West experiences a veritable explosion of research into
the great oriental religions, including Islam. Henceforth the question, at least in scholarly
circles, was not how do we learn about these “heathen” religions for missionary or
apologetic purposes (i.e. in order to convert their adherents), but how do we understand and
do justice to religions that are in all the relevant respects comparable and in some aspects
perhaps even superior to Judeo-Christianity. By the early 20th century, except for Zen
Buddhism, the religious contribution of the non-Christian world had been explored and
documented with great depth—although not always without preconceptions and prejudices
it must be said, since the West as the colonial and imperial power could not easily abandon
its tacit belief in its superiority culturally, materially, and by extension, spiritually. It was left
to D. T. Suzuki to introduce the West to Japanese Zen Buddhism in an authoritative
manner, with his monumental Essays in Zen Buddhism (three volumes, 1927-1934).
This exposure at the turn of the century to the wisdom of the East, coupled with the
triumph of a more tolerant, open, less dogmatic theological climate due to the results of
Biblical and Historical criticism, led to the rise of the Ecumenical Movement. Christians in the
West felt more humble now about inter-confessional differences and divisions, made more
painful by now amply documented centuries of religious warfare and heresy trials among
Christians belonging to different confessions and churches. The Enlightenment and the rise
18
I have already briefly alluded to the manifesto of early 20th century
Fundamentalism. a series of pamphlets collected and published in 1917 as The Fundamentals
in four volumes. This collection was in effect the successor and in some ways American
counterpart of the Living Papers (since the authors of the earlier collection were mostly
British), although the authors of the earlier collection were not Fundamentalists or
Dispensationalists (as were many of the authors of The Fundamentals). Fundamentalism is, as
I say above, a distinctively American movement.
11
of secular states (of which the first was the United States of America, to the credit of Roger
Williams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson) had contributed to greater toleration,
respect, and civility between members of the many sects and denominations populating the
Christian West. At first the movement was intended only for inter-faith dialogue among
Christians. Soon, especially after the 1930s, it became obvious that the world religions could
not be excluded from the dialogue.19 Ecumenism had to be a worldwide affair, and the work
of Troeltsch (particularly his 1923 paper, “The Place of Christianity Among the World
Religions”) and the avalanche of scholarly investigations, books, and faculty and contacts
between East and West contributed in no small measure to the change in attitude.
There was of course resistance to this changed atmosphere. What is surprising is not
that evangelical or conservative Christianity continued to oppose the changes and inveigh
vehemently against what it perceived (and still does perceive) as compromises with evil and
radical departures from the historic Christian faith. Fundamentalism, an American
movement at the turn of the century, led the battle in the 20th century, opposing not only
ecumenism, historical criticism, but also Darwinian evolution, and even geological and
cosmological theories about an “old” earth (a view that has only recently, with respect only
to an “old” earth and not evolution, made concessions to modern science). But
Fundamentalism is in reality, with few exceptions,20 parasitic and dependent on the 19th
century apologetics of Hengstenberg, et al. and in that sense is continuous with and moored
to the past. What is surprising is that a critique of liberalism would emerge from within
liberalism itself in the work of Karl Barth (1889-1968). Barth’s rejection of 19th century
liberalism, interpreted by Barth as quintessentially articulated by its greatest theologian,
Schleiermacher, is a major mistake and falling away from historic and Reformation
19
Cf. William E. Hocking, Re-Thinking Missions (1932), where a more inclusive,
pluralistic stance is recommended, in contrast to the dominant exclusivist view maintained
by Christians since the inception of the missionary movement, a view ably defended, from a
Barthian perspective, by Heindrik Kraemer in The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World
(1938) and Why Christianity of all Religions (1962).
20
I have in mind the recent (post-1980s) work of Ravi Zacharias, J. P. Moreland,
Gary Habermas, and William Lane Craig, the leading evangelical apologists and who are all
still very active today (for references students should consult my article, “On the Possibility
of an Evangelical Theology,” Theology Today, Volume 55, 1998). Among the earlier apologists
one also must mention C. S. Lewis (1930-1960) and Francis Schaeffer (1960-1980), and
especially Alvin Plantinga (83 years old as I write), who began his apologetic work in the
1960s but who has recently written against the type of historical criticism as advocated by
Troeltsch (“Two Types of Historical Criticism,” a chapter in his book, Warranted Christian
Belief [2000]), for their enormous impact and continuing influence. Zacharias, of Indian
parentage, has made it his business to evaluate and compare the world religions with
Christianity, concluding (predictably) that Christianity is the absolute truth, and superior to
the others in every significant respect. Troeltsch was right that conservative Christianity
tends to ignore or dismiss modern developments, and most certainly Christianity’s encounter
with the world religions. Norman Geisler, also a leading apologist initially in the 19th century
mold, has since the 1980s moved closer to a Protestant Thomism, and constantly debates
philosophers and theologians in the lecture circuit (as do Moreland, Zacharias, and Craig).
12
Christianity (Luther and Calvin). But this same Barth had been a devoted disciple of the
master himself in his seminary years (along with his teachers, Wilhelm Herrmann and Ernst
Troeltsch, the greatest Schleiermachians of the 20th century). Beginning with his Commentary
on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Ger. Römerbrief, 1918, 2nd enlarged and rewritten edition, 1922),
written under the influence of the Danish existentialist religious thinker, Soren Kierkegaard
(d. 1855),21 followed by his university lectures on The Theology of Schleiermacher (1923/1924,
English transl., 1982),22 and culminating with his monumental Church Dogmatics (1932-1968),
Barth mounted what has to be considered without question the most impressive and
sustained critique of 19the century liberal theology (from Schleiermacher to Troeltsch). (I
deal with that critique in my courses on Contemporary Issues in Religious Thought and
Contemporary Theology.)
Barth is unique. Without being biblicist (Bible=inerrant Word of God), he is a
Biblical theologian who takes the Word of God seriously; without being a confessionalist or
dogmatist in the 17th or 19th century Neo-Pietist sense of the word, he is a theologian who
writes a dogmatics; without believing that Christianity, qua a world religion, is any better than
Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, yet he still manages to believe that it is the unique, final, and
absolute revelation of God to humankind.23 Reluctantly at first, but now in greater numbers,
evangelical conservatives see in Barth an ally in their struggle against liberalism. Barth’s NeoOrthodoxy or Dialectical Theology, as it came to be known, had prominent allies. In particular,
we must mention the great New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976), and the
American theologians Reinhold Niebuhr (d. 1970) and his brother H. Richard Niebuhr (d.
1962).24 At first an ally but then a sympathetic critic,25 Paul Tillich (d. 1965) has to be classed
21
Kierkegaard is considered, along with Nietzsche and Dostoievski, the forerunners
of 20 century Existentialism. In works such as Attack upon Christendom, Either/Or,
Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postcript, Kierkegaard sharply criticized the
decadent and compromising “liberal” Christianity of mid 19th century Denmark, but quite
relevant to theological liberalism in general. This critique lay dormant for over fifty years,
since Kierkegaard’s “voice crying in the wilderness” went unnoticed and unheeded during
his lifetime (he paid for the publication of his books). But in the work of the early Barth
(1918-1932), Kierkegaard was heard again, and quite loudly.
th
22
Barth wrote three other essays on Schleiermacher that have to be mentioned, both
from the 1920s:
“Schleiermacher’s Celebration of Christmas” (on Schleiermacher’s
controversial 1806 book), “Schleiermacher,” both in Theology and the Church, a collection of
his early papers published in English in 1962; and the later paper, written and published in
1952, “Schleiermacher,” in Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (English transl.,
1972).
23
Barth believes that by God’s grace and sovereign will God has “elevated”
Christianity to a privileged status vis à vis the other world religions. Barth’s most sustained
treatment of the relationship of Christianity to the world religions is in Church Dogmatics. The
work of Heindrik Kraemer are influential statements of the Barthian approach to the world
religions.
24
Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, specially Moral Man and Immoral Society(1932), and The
Nature and Destiny of Man (2 volumes, 1941-1943), is closer to Barth in spirit if not in letter;
13
ultimately with the liberals, and many would say the same about Bultmann (though I do not
agree).
But Neo-Orthodox was unstable, one could say almost inherently so.26 Suffice it to
say that “dialectical” for Barth meant both a yes and a no; that is, theology is a human all-too
human affair (cf. his appreciative introduction to the publishing of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The
Essence of Christianity in 1957),27 while it is yet a speaking or proclamation of the Word of God
to humankind (at the same time!); Christianity as a religion is no better than Hinduism,
Buddhism, and the like, but as God’s chosen vessel for His disclosure to humans, it is the
absolute religion (at the same time); he believed in the Word of God, but the Word was
the work of his brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, influenced by both Troeltsch and Tillich on
the one hand, and Jonathan Edwards and Barth on the other, is more ambivalent in crucial
respects but just as important. H. Richard Niebuhr’s influence on contemporary theologians
as diverse as Gordon Kaufman, Van Harvey, Richard R. Niebuhr, Ronald Thiemann,
Edward Farley, John B. Cobb, Peter Hodgson is incalculable.
25
Tillich’s paper, “What is Wrong with the “Dialectic” Theology,” Journal of Religion
XV (1935), 127-45, is a compelling critique of Barth’s “supernaturalism,” inter alia.
Bultmann, in works like “New Testament and Mythology” (1941), and Jesus Christ and
Mythology, distanced himself from the Barth of Dogmatics in significant ways, although
remaining quite “Barthian” in the fundamental assumptions. In Jesus Christ and Mythology,
Jesus and the Word, and New Testament Theology, Bultmann articulates a rather sceptical
approach to the historical Jesus, who for him is only available to us through the Christian
proclamation (Kerygma)and the “eyes of faith,” a view reminiscent of the late 19th century
liberals (cf. the invaluable survey of the 19th century “lives of Jesus” by Albert Schweizer, The
Quest for the Historical Jesus [1906]). Tillich’s Systematic Theology (1951-1963) and other works
reveal a theologian who is more willing to grant to modern culture a greater status and
influence in shaping our understanding and content of the Christian message than Barth
would allow. In way Tillich is exceptional in his willingness to engage the modern world in
ways reminiscent of Troeltsch.
26
Despite his natural sympathy for Barth’s critique of 19th century liberalism, Charles
C. Ryrie, a leading Fundamentalist theologian of the 1960s and 1970s, in a pamphlet
published in 1958 entitled Neo-Orthodoxy, takes Barth to task for not defining his position
clearly on the side of the Orthodoxy he alleged to be defending and restoring. For Ryrie,
Barth is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and perhaps more dangerous because of it. Many, if not
most, Fundamentalist Christians agree.
27
Ludwig Feuerbach (d. 1872) published in 1841 The Essence of Christianity, in which
gives an analysis of religion that reduces theology to anthropology (i.e. religion is a
projection or creation of the human imagination, and religious values a reflection of human
values and ideals attributed to an infinite being, God, who does not exist outside of our
imagination). This critique and interpretation of religion, and of Christianity in particular,
influenced Marx and aspects of it can be seen in Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, inter alia.
Feuerbach’s interpretation receives further elaboration in The Essence of Faith According to
Luther (1844) and Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1848).
14
ultimately Jesus for Barth, not the written word which for him was not inerrant or infallible,
and therefore a human word, even when it became (technical term for Barth) the Word of God
(at the same time). Barth was still too much a child of the Enlightenment, and he could not or
would not abandon historical criticism (however much he tried to limit it to the “human”
side of Christianity). By the 1960s Neo-Orthodxy was moribund; and worse, liberalism was
making a comeback, almost with a vengeance. That story would take us too far afield for the
purposes of this course and is the subject of other courses I teach at FIU, so stay tuned. But
what needs to be said is that since the 1960s, we are right back where Ernst Troeltsch left us,
in a radically pluralistic world; with a strong historical-critical methodology that has
confirmed the work of de Wette, Strauss, and Baur (although modifying to some degree in
some cases, to larger degrees in others, the material conclusions of these great pioneers but
not the methodological principles or orientation); with stronger sense of the ecumenical,
trans-cultural task ahead of us; and with an even greater awareness of the grave dangers of
dogmatism and extreme fundamentalisms that threaten to destroy the well being and
flourishing of what is now one world community.
I have dealt only briefly in this handout with non-theological developments that
shaped the study of religion in the 19th and first half of the 20th century and word needs to be
said about this. I have incidentally mentioned Nietzsche, Hume, and Kant in either of the
handouts. However, Hume, in his essay, The Natural History of Religion, stimulated what I
have would to call somewhat anachronistically the purely “sociological” (“anthropological”
or “ethnological”), and through Freud the “psychological” study of religion. Hume’s,
Kant’s, Hegel’s, Feuerbach’s, Marx’s, Comte’s, and Nietzsche’s28 critiques and analyses of
religion also contributed to this growing trend, culminating, as already mentioned, in the
work of E. B. Tylor, Emile Durkheim, Freud; and in the early 20th century, Max Weber (The
Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, Sociology of Religion, Ancient Judaism, The Religion of
China and India, and important essays on the sociology of religion), and Ernst Troeltsch (The
Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, and the incomplete Historicism and its Problems), to
mention only the most prominent names. These analyses have proved fecund and led to
“structuralist,” “post-structuralist,” or “post-modernist” interpretations of religious
phenomena. Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Mary Douglas, Réne
Girard, Joseph Campbell, inter alia, have proffered seminal analyses of religion in the second
half of the 20th century that continue to influence and shape the study of religion.29
In the period after 1920 to 1960 the work of Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of
Cultures), Victor Turner (The Ritual Process), Peter Berger (The Sacred Canopy: A Sociological
Interpretation of Religion), Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and the Profane, Cosmos and History: The Myth
of the Eternal Return) in anthropology and sociology represent a new appreciation for religion,
at the very least as a substantive dimension of the human that has to be taken into account.
28
Anticipated in often ponderous (and often overly simplistic and hostile) critiques
of religion by several Enlightenment figures in the late 17th early 18th century, as we saw
earlier.
29
For more details about the sociological or anthropological study of religion since
the Enlightenment, consult Edward Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), and
J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion (1987).
15
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology has proved a very useful method for analyzing religious
phenomena, as well as Martin Heidegger’s early and later work.30 Since the 1960s the work
of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, particularly his The Meaning and End of Religion (1963) has
stimulated analyses of religion that are not reductionist or based on a hostile attitude toward
religion. Other developments have been pointed out in the course of this handout.
30
Husserl, Ideas: Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913); Heidegger, Being and Time
(1927), and his later work, especially “Letter on Humanism” (1946).
16