Faith and Skepticism in the New Common-Place

Paul Harvey

Don't miss Christopher Grasso, "Skepticism and Faith: The Early Republic," in the new Common-Place. Earlier we blogged about his piece "Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution," Journal of American History 95:1 (June 2008): 43-68. The Common-Place piece is a more personal reflection on what forces shape one's historical questions, how they are related to present questions but not bound by them, and indeed often start long before current preoccupations became preoccupations. He writes:

I'm reminded of a colleague who recently published a book on warfare and American history from the colonial period to the late twentieth century. Reviews discussed the study as if it had been inspired by the Iraq war. The author certainly did not claim to live in a cultural vacuum, unaffected by the current state of affairs; still, his project began two decades ago and is based on exhaustive research. Histories, though written in a particular time and place and from a particular point of view, may inspire op-ed pieces but shouldn't be confused with them.

His project came out of exploring the papers of Ezra Stiles (Congregationalist minister and president of Yale College in the late eighteenth century), including Stiles's own very secretive and closeted struggles with doubt and skepticism.

By retracing my steps to my encounter with Ezra Stiles in the library, I don't mean to suggest that the project was incubated entirely in the archives. No research is completely unconnected to personal experience. That doesn't mean religious history, any more than other kinds of history, entails one of those confessional prefaces in which the author discloses his or her personal relationship to the faith tradition being examined. Perry Miller's atheism and George Marsden's evangelicalism no doubt influenced each man's studies of the Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards, but the evaluation of their books should aim at the cogency of their interpretive arguments in relation to the available evidence rather than at the scholars' biographies. The historian's own religious belief or doubt is one of many factors shaping his or her particular perspective, a point of view that provides moments of both blindness and insight when trying to imagine the past.

Grasso's story focuses on a period usually characterized by the triumph of evangelicalism, moral movements inspired by it, and the demise of the skeptical Enlightened tradition. My own work (and that of many others) questions this story from the "underside of that millennium" [sorry, a little self-quotation], focusing on Native peoples, African Americans, and others. The focus here is different, for Grasso has dug into the archives of white Americans whose skepticism engaged in a constant dialogue with the rise of "America's God." As he explains,

But the story of the relation of skepticism and faith is more than the tale of a few marginalized freethinkers and artificially induced moral panics. Religious skepticism touched—and in some cases transformed—more lives than we might expect in the early American republic.

This is really an affecting, and an effective, piece, both for its history, its historiography, and its personal reflections on how we come to the topics we do, and how we think about those topics within our own personal and institutional contexts.

UPDATE: John Fea and Brad Hart have blogged further on this piece.

Understanding Jonathan Edwards

Paul Harvey

A little preview of a book currently available but with a publication date of 2009. The Jonathan Edwards scholar Gerald R. McDermott has put together a nice compilation of essays, aimed at a fairly general readership: Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America's Theologian. The book features leading scholars with essays such as "Jonathan Edwards's Life and Career: Society and Self," by Kenneth Minkema, "Edwards and Revival" by Harry Stout, "Edwards and the Bible" by Douglas Sweeney, and "Edwards and the World Religions" by McDermott. Each essay is paired with an "alternative viewpoints" piece commenting, dissenting from, or supplementing the lead essays. The result is, as advertised, a user friendly introduction that will interest even those (like me) who tend to be resistant to or bored by theological texts.

The introduction to the volume summarizes some of the paradoxes that make Edwards as a man a fascinating subject, his standing as a thinker having long-since been established:

". . . Edwards thought of himself as a British subject loyal to the Empre but was at the same time sensitive to his colony's grievances. He was ambivalent towards Indians (hating their religion but loving many of those he knew personally), a philosopher who picked and choise from the world's best thinkers, and a religious thinker whose theology sowed the seeds of the very democracy he feared. He defended slavery but opposed the slave trade and offered Janus-faced positions on gender."

The Perils of Evangelical Scholarship

Thanks to Gerardo Marti for his 2nd guest post of the week! See a couple of entries below for his fuller biography.

The Perils of Evangelical Scholarship

by Gerardo Marti

I just finished one of the saddest books I’ve ever read. Having heard of George Eldon Ladd as an admired figure among thoughtful evangelicals, I picked up this new biography by John D’Elia. The book, A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America, describes Ladd’s career in the context of the evangelical struggles of his day. Comparing the fervor of a young Harvard graduate at the beginning of the book to the debilitated and disillusioned professor barely able to speak at the end makes this a tragic, rather than triumphant, tale.

Growing up in Orange County, California, I always heard George Eldon Ladd associated with his book A Theology of the New Testament, a synthetic and highly readable text that pulled various scholarly threads together while honoring a commitment to inerrancy. But, behind this work lay a lifetime of effort, and D’Elia’s book lays it all out.

Ladd did not consider this later book to be his most important. Instead, D’Elia shows Ladd as an earnest student who craved a deeper engagement with critical scholarship and worked his way into the Harvard Divinity School. There, he absorbed and appreciated the theological innovations of the day, particularly the work of Rudolf Bultmann. Although Ladd never fully agreed with Bultmann (he eventually wrote his own assessment for Intervarsity Press), he deeply admired Bultmann’s principal goal – to overcome obstacles to the gospel amidst modern metaphysical assumptions. For Ladd, Bultmann’s demythologizing project had the right goal if not the right conclusions.

Ladd’s move to the newly established Fuller Theological Seminary fueled his desire to promote serious scholarly engagement from within evangelicalism. Alas, he faced fervent opposition by more established wings of evangelicalism that were unwilling to expand (give up?) questions and approaches considered to be legitimate. In the book, John Walvoord, president of Dallas Theological Seminary, stands out as an arch-defender of dispensationalist orthodoxy who alternately engages, critiques, and ultimately ignores Ladd’s effort to articulate issues in a different key.

George Eldon Ladd’s back-and-forth interaction with dispensationalism was peripheral to his truer ambition – a carefully prepared theological work that demonstrated evangelicals could incorporate the best aspects of contemporary Biblical scholarship effectively. Over a decade in the making, Jesus and the Kingdom: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (currently printed as The Presence of the Future) was released in 1964. It was published by Harper and Row, a mainstream publisher, which bolstered Ladd’s hopes of elevating the profile of a critically engaged evangelicalism.

His enthusiasm was short lived. Norman Perrin, a respected Chicago Divinity School Professor of the New Testament, wrote a prominent book review that disagreed with several aspects of the analysis, marginalized the book, and failed to promote it as a fundamental text for future scholars. Combined with other battles and disappointments, Ladd sank into depression and alcoholism. His Fuller students and colleagues later recognized him in touching ways, yet Ladd never recovered. To his bitter disillusionment, Ladd found more conservative evangelicals to be critical and reactionary. Although he spent much of his life striving to accomplish the highest levels of scholarship while keeping his evangelical roots intact, his effort failed. He crumbled under the weight of criticism of his most cherished book and gave up his ambition to engage mainstream scholarship from the evangelical perspective calling it “a fool’s quest.”

For myself, I read D’Elia’s book as an exploration of the consequences of evangelical anti-intellectualism. George Eldon Ladd fought against the closed-circle assumptions found among many conservative evangelicals, assumptions that keep them fighting over internal orthodoxy while retreating from broader dialogues. D’Elia approaches this as a contest of wills with dramatic interchanges between a dozen notable figures. Yet, the pervasive background he brings to the text is a description of an intellectual climate still present among some fundamentalist-oriented evangelicals, and so the book provides a personal counterpoint to anti-intellectualist ethos described in works by Mark Noll, Richard Hofstadter, and even in the enjoyable new book by Thomas Kidd.

On the positive side, I believe Ladd was far more successful in his quest than he believed. Not only did he become a respected figure among evangelicals, he also may well have contributed indirectly to the expansion of evangelicals doing mainstream intellectual work, a development described by Michael Lindsey in his new book and, more specifically, an article in the May 9th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Evangelicalism Rebounds in Academe.” These developments don’t indicate the mainstreaming of evangelicalism per se, yet I believe the image of critically-engaged evangelicals accomplishing high quality intellectual work both in and out of the academy would have pleased him.

God for Dummies, Literally

by Randall Stephens

Here is a debate that rarely, if ever, erupts in the quiet halls historians and religious studies scholars inhabit: Folks who believe in God are not the sharpest tools in the box. Or, God is for dunderheads . . . So, Mencken was right. The Chronicle Review recently brought up the research of Richard Lynn, University of Ulster psychology professor emeritus, who is both raising hackles and stirring up dust.

Richard Lynn . . . . has ignited a fresh dispute. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Intelligence—which was co-written with John Harvey, an independent scholar, and Helmuth Nyborg, a professor of psychology at the University of Aarhus, in Denmark— Lynn argues that there is a strong correlation between high levels of intelligence and disbelief in God.

What would it look like if a historian of American religion bought this argument? (Might that amount to professional suicide, or, at least, maiming?) Would he or she dust off ye olde secularization thesis?: “Since the 1960s, believers have been dumb and dumberer.” Would the model work for 19th or early 20th century history?: “Pentecostals—intense believers—were thicker than a block of wood. They may or may not have been dispossessed, but they certainly were stupid.” Sounds like the old mainline chestnuts from the 1950s.

Lynn’s previous arguments concerning race, gender, and intelligence are damning enough. And the comments the Chronicle has culled from newspapers and blogs are telling. It seems that few academics and commentators, regardless of their own take on the matter, want to jump in Lynn's boat.