Lecture 10

The Nineteenth Century Struggle With Modernity

 

            Most historians have the habit of dating the 19th century in terms of the two great great wars that bracket its central development.  The century began with the French Revolution and ended with the First World War.  Between these two catastrophes, European and American religious life was dominated by a titanic struggle on the part of the churches to come to terms with the new world in which they lived.  And this was a struggle against a far more insidious enemy than the medieval struggle with Islam.  For the sake of discussion, we can mention some of the giants that the churches had to face:

 

1.      A political order that was becoming democratic and was skeptical of the political and social role of the churches.   Even where the church remained technically established, it existed in a new and different environment.  One byproduct of this was the first stirrings of the ecumenical spirit and some states in Germany, such as Prussia, had “Union” churches that brought together Reformed and Lutherans.

 

2.      A economic order that was rooted in the emergence of large cities, the rational organization of labor, the ability of European (and American) agriculture to feed its own people for the first time, new forms of transportation and communication, and an almost incredible expansion of consumer goods.  Every aspect of European life was affected by these changes, including such matters as gender roles.  The idea that women should shop, for instance, was directly related to the fact that women were now in charge of the home and its organization.  Surplus wealth also enabled the churches to spread around the world with minimal help from their newly suspicious governments.

 

3.      An international order that was dominated by western imperialism.  In many ways imperialism was a very complex phenomenon.  In most cases, Europeans and Americans were more organizers than they were bearers of sovereign power, but they remade the world.  In the process, they began a worldwide increase in both production and in expectations.  A clean shirt in India became every bit as expected as it was in London.  The churches were aided and harmed by this expansion.  On the positive side, Christian missionaries were protected by the massive navies and land armies that some European powers possessed.  On the other hand, the churches were often in some conflict with colonial authorities who saw no reason to change people’s patterns of religious and social life.   If anything colonial administrators tended to adopt the native patterns of life—especially, in economics and politics—and to dislike the church’s hope to ‘civilize’ the natives through schools and hospitals.

 

4.      An intellectual order that was predicated on the centrality of science and objective knowledge.  Even in the most romantic of romantic philosophies, the central truths of the enlightenment remained all but uncontested.  At the end of the 19th century when a new science began to replace the old, the same inner logic continued into a less determinate world.

 

5.      To an extent that we are just beginning to realize, sexuality and gender also were continually changing.  The church found itself confronting issues in this area that were almost totally unanticipated.  If the fall of the nobles was the most evident social change (and that obviously limited), the changing nature of gender issues was equally important and obscured.

 

Three words were used in the 19th century to summarize the Christian cause.  Leaders called for the church to be awakened, revived, or renewed.  All three terms pointed to the altered place of the church in the western system of things.

 

Some theological history:

 

            The 19th century was one of the most spectacular ages in the history of Protestant theology.  The historian can find many reasons for this renewed creativity.  Certainly, it was connected to the importance of the issues and the sense that the church was under attack.  But, it was more than stimulus response.  During the 19th century, western governments discovered the value of education on all levels.  Universities began to expand rapidly, and new schools were established.  The University of Berlin, for instance, began its history with one of the ablest faculties in theology in all of Germany.  In addition, these new institutions were often founded on the basis of a new ideal of teaching and learning.  They were institutions that believed that the task of the professor was not simply to hold classes but also to develop specific knowledge and to conduct research.  In that sense, higher education became an adult enterprise with students responsible for their own learning.  In Germany, the intellectual leader in most of the west, courses no longer had grades or assignments.  The real test was the examination administered by the state at the conclusion of the student’s period of residence.  In other words, the structures permitted and encouraged the growth of knowledge.

 

            Biblical studies were one area that did expand in this period.  Throughout the 18th century, significant questions were addressed to the text.  By the beginning of the         19th, these began to be resolved.  In part this was because the scholarly grunt work was done and done well.  Wilhelm Gesenius, (d. .1842 )the great Hebraist, published very skilled Hebrew Grammars and Dictionaries that raised the art of Old Testament study to a new height.  The new understanding of the Greek of the New Testament as Koine that eventually informed the work of Tischendorff and Westcott and Hort.  But more important the historical veracity of the Bible was under examination.  It became clear to many scholars, for instance, that the Pentateuch was more likely than not the product of a long development that began long before Moses and continued to the period of Exile.  Such prophets as Isaiah were also seen as composite documents.  In a similar way, the New Testament record was deconstructed.  Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the great theologian and organist, talked about a 19th century Quest of the Historical Jesus ( In German: Die Frage nach. . .Jesu). But the image, far more vivid in English than German, was not real.  The question after Jesus had  no real end.

 

            In other words, one of the classical foundations of theology was eroded almost beyond recognition by the new scholarship.  This made it difficult for the church to continue its theology as it had before since that theology had been based on the reading of the Scriptural text.  It was appropriate to ask, as the American theologian Washington Gladden did, how much is left of the old doctrines.  It was a good question.

 

            Other serious questions were equally afoot.  Perhaps one of the most important of these was the nature of humankind.  The ancient understanding of humankind that left human nature suspended between heaven and earth—lower than God, higher than the angels—was gradually destroyed.  By the time of Charles Darwin (1808-1882), it was clear that humans were a species of mammals that had evolved from very humble beginnings. 

 

 The great species had been dethroned.   Further, it became at least conceivable that life itself originated in a chemical accident that was more likely not than random.

 

            One has to have some of this background in view to appreciate the work of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834).

 

 

  Schleiermacher was the son of a Reformed pastor who was deeply influenced by the Moravians and sent his children to Moravian schools.  At those schools, Schleiermacher’s religious life was awakened, but he found that his intellectual growth was hindered.  He wanted to be both a modern person and a Christian.

 

            As he matured intellectually, he came to be deeply influenced by the Romantic movement,.  Historians have long had difficult defining Romanticism.  It was a philosophy that stressed feeling, that valued poetry and the non-cognitive aspects of life.  It was often deeply involved in historical thinking.  In England, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the most important Romantic figure.  Coleridge, building on Kant, distinguished between the understanding and the reason.  For him, understanding could only describe the outer reality of things.  In this area, however, it was totally sovereign.  Pigs did not fly.  But Reason (and here his language is non-Kantian) could penetrate imaginatively into things.  Poems were often descriptions of what was really real in human life and events.  Likewise, religion, whether objectively the case or not, penetrated to the depths of human life.  In this, he was similar to Kant as well.  For Coleridge did not believe that the biblical events need to have happened to be significant.

 

            In a similar vain, Schleiermacher set out to be an apologist to his generation.  In his On Religion, Speeches to its cultured despisers, Schleiermacher began to ask what religion was.  It clearly was not knowing nor could it be doing (ethics).  Most of us know, almost instinctively that the most acute theologian is not the most religious person or that the ethical person may not be the believer (Kierkegaard would later make much of this).  Instead, he found the meaning of religion in self-consciousness, in Feeling, in that which provides us with identity.  In one sense, religion was that which enabled us to understand the whole instead of the parts. But what shaped religion which was never pure.  Here Schleiermacher began with the  individual and moved out to the church.  It was in the church’s mediation of Jesus’ own awareness of God.

 

            Later in the Christian faith, Schleiermacher would draw out the implications of his beginning point as he talked about such things as absolute dependence, of Christ self-consciousness (So strong that we can say that God was in Christ: a different view of Christology).  There is little doubt that Schleiermacher was the most able theologian since Calvin.

 

            Hegel (1770-1831)

                       

                        The dialectic

                        How does human thought move

                        The Ideal of the Absolute

                        The need to reinterprete Art and Religion

                        The theory of development

           

            Isaac Dorner (1809-1884)

 

                        The idea of the kenosis of Christ

                        The salvation of those who had never heard

                        Christ was designed to be the Head of Humanity

            The New Liberalism:

                        Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889)

                        Religion was a matter of value judgements, of practical life

                                    Influence of Rudolf Lotze

                                    The difference between faith and philosophy:

                                                Philosophy yields a first cause, faith finds a loving father

                        Theology and religion rested on the historical person of Jesus

                        Two foci of Jesus teaching

                                    Justification: we are drawn by God to God

                                    Reconciliation: we must move toward our neighbot

                        Father of the later Social Gospel in Germany and America

           

 

 Some important British Figures:

            John Frederick Maurice (1805-1872)

                        A broad churchman

                        One of the earliest English scholars of World Religions.

                        Theological Essays

                                    Rejected idea of hell torments

                        The workingmen’s college

                        Christ as the head of humanity

                        The new kingdom

                        Fired from his teaching position for arguing against eternal torments. 

                        Continued to serve as an Anglican pastor

            Alfred Tenneyson (1809-1882)

                        In Memoriam

            Anglo-Catholicism or the new high church

                        Perhaps the most influential British movement

                        Based somewhat on the general romantic movement

                        Began with Irish emancipation

                        John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

                                    The Tracts for the Times

                                    The search for authority

                                    Tract 90: Rome and Protestants have same doctrine of

                                                Justification!

                                    Became a roman catholic

The best conservative mind of the 19th century                     

                        The Cambridge movement

Wanted to revive Catholic Aesthetics, particularly, Gothic architecture

The issue of Ireland and whether the Church of Ireland (Anglican) should be supported by taxation.

                        Ritualism

                       

            The decline of the establishment

           

Experiments with Missions:

            Kenneth Scott Latourette called the 19th century, the Great Century, because of

                        The work of Christian missionaries

            The Christian church began to become less European, less white

            Major advances were made in Asia, especially, India and China

            A number of fascinating people:

                        William Carey (1761-1831)

 

                                   

                                    Baptist missionary

                                    Changed his denomination’s views on foreign missions

Student of the works of Jonathan Edwards and Baptist Theological Andrew Fuller

An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. A History of Missionary Activity from the Early Church to John Wesley

                                    “Expect Great Things from God, Attempt Great things for God”

In India founded a university, Serampore College, that taught both Indian and Western culture

                                    Translation of the Scriptures into Bengali, Sanskrit

                        Robert Morrison (1781-1834)  Scot

Had to go to China via New York since the East India Company would not transport missionaries, later he worked for the Company

His passion was to publish the Bible in Chinese

He established his press in Malay because it was against the law to print Bible or materials on Christianity in China

                                    The problem of England’s two Opium wars with China

                        David Livingstone (1813-1873)

 

                                    The search for the headwaters of the Nile

                                    Early medical missionary

                                    The Universities Mission

                        Hudson Taylor: (1832-1905)

 

 The China Inland Mission 1865

Inspired the famous Cambridge Seven

                                    The principle of faith missions

                                    The desire to go where no one had ever gone

                                    The Boxer rebellion

                                    The center of liberal missionary work

                                    The deep affection of Americans for China: the crisis

                                                Of the 1940s over who lost China

                        The American Board of Commissioners

The Hay Prayer Meeting at Williams August 1806.  Four Williams’ Students Samuel Mills, Byram Green, Francis Robbins

James Richards.

They went to Andover Seminary

Helped to convince Leonard Wood and Moses Stuart to found the American Board

                                    Leading American sponsor of missionaries

                                    One of many “American” societies formed to led missions

                                    These societies were originally ecumenical although they

                                                Leaned towards the then closely related Congregational/

                                                            Presbyterian churches

                                                These societies were later the various denomination-

                                                            al agencies of the Congregational Church

                                    Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) and Luther Rice (1783-1836):

                                                Originally Congregationalists

                                                Converted to a different view of Baptism while on route

                                                            To India

                                                Established the Triennial convention

                                                Although Judson originally believed that he could work

                                                            With the upper classes, his successors went to

                                                            The Karens who were a primitive people who

                                                            Were outcastes

                                                           

                                                In India, there was a similar movement by all Churches

                                                            To the outcaste peoples of the region.

His wife was a hero to Baptist women in America and one of the most popular 19th century religious writers.

 

                                                The meaning of the phrase, The Christian Century

                        The Sunday School movement:

                                    Began in England as an attempt to reach the new industrial

                                                Classes

                                    Methodists in 1790 established the policy of establishing

                                                Such schools next to their churches

                                    American Sunday School Union—1817

                                    Became more denominational as years passed

                                    The uniform lesson plan devised by John H. Vincent in 1866

                                                Still a money maker for the National Council of Churches

                                    Chautauqua Assembly: originally established to train SS teachers

                                    American theologian Horace Bushnell (1802-1876)

                                                Pastor in Hartford Conn.

                                                Very disillustioned with the Congregationalism of his day

                                                Christian Nurture (1847)

                                                The child becomes Christian by living in a Christian home

                                                First theologian to write about the importance of recreation

                                                Believed that theological language was not always precise

                                                Ann Douglas: The Feminization of American Christianity

                                                            Saw Bushnell as replacing hard, masculine

                                                                        doctrines with doctrines that were more

                                                                        pleasing to his largely female audience

                                                            Clearly, Douglas believes that Bushnell and other

                                                                        Middle classed pastors were the prisoners

                                                                        Of the female majority.

                                                The problem of language and of creativity

                                                Bushnell visited California

                        Like much of the American nation, the churches become caught up in

                                    Reform movements.

                                    Anti-slavery was often rooted in Northern Movements to

                                                Improve society

                                    Confidence that the world could and would be remade.

                                    Early antislavery people were Quakers

                                    During the 1830s, antislavery spread to Northern Churches

                                                Most Northern churches were not necessarily anti-slavery

                                                            Many wanted to keep slavery out of the territories

                                                            Racism was often a motive

                                                            Abolition was a minority viewpoint

                                    Southerners developed a proslavery standpoint and theology

                                                Slavery was seen as a blessing

                                                Slavery often compared to factories in the North

                        The seedbed of the later ecumenical movement

                        Temperance Movement:

                                    Americans drank a phenomenal amount by our standards

                                    Worries over immigrants and the ‘continental’ sabbath

                                    The Methodist experiment with water in communion

                                    Maine tries prohibition in the 1850s (briefly)

                                    Movement for temperance grows thoroughout the century

                                                In America, Congregationalists and Methodists

                                                            Led this movement.

                                    During the First World War, the US experimented with

                                                A constitutional amendment to prohibit alcoholic

                                                Beverages

                                    The law collapsed during prohibition.

                        The Social Gospel

                                    Be careful to distinguish between the social gospel, social service,

                                                And social science

                                    All three were responses to the new world of large cities and

                                                A changing world view that was common at the turn of

                                                The century

                                    Social Science was originally founded by people like Albion

                                                Small, President of Colby College, who wanted to find

                                                A scientific way to realize Christian social principles

                                    Social Service was common to all American denominations

                                                With the Wesleyan churches in the lead

                                                The Salvation Army

                                                The various missions for alcoholics and others

                                                                The Settlement houses

                                                The Institutional Churches

                                                            Reading and gyms

                                                The two YMCA and the YWCA

                                                Youth work

                                    Social Gospel

                                                An attempt to restate Christian Doctrine in the Light of

                                                            The needs of the world

Congregationalist Washington Gladden (1836-1918)

                                                            Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918)

                                                            The Methodist Social Creed, 1907

                                                The “Kingdom of God” was key idea

All social gospel advocates were liberal Christians; but not all

 Liberal Christians were social gospel advocates