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Continental Influence on American Christian Thought Since World War I*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Affiliation:
Yala University
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Extract

Just after the turn of the nineteenth century, the Rev. Samuel Miller, then a Presbyterian minister in New York but soon to become a professor of ecclesiastical history at the newly-founded Princeton Theological Seminary, published his ambitious Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century. He remarks in due course that “it would be improper to pass in silence the celebrated IMMANUEL KANT, Professor at Koeningsberg, in Prussia.” He then goes on to comment on the “extravagant panegyrics” of Kant's disciples, but having heard “that the acutest understanding cannot tolerably comprehend [this profound and extensive system] by less than a twelve-month's study,” he satisfied himself with a brief second-hand report. The incident might be considered an accurate commentary on the state of “Continental influence on American Christian thought” in 1803.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 1958 , pp. 256 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1958

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References

1. A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1803), II, pp. 22 ff.Google Scholar

2. Pochmann, Henry A., German Culture in America, 1600–1900: Philosophical and Literary, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957)Google Scholar surveys the men and events here mentioned and many more, with much bibliographical support. See also Vogel, Stanley M., German Literary Influences on the American Transcendentalists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).Google Scholar

3. Obviously no term like “Fundamentalist” ever has a single, definite, invariable, agreed-upon meaning. Because this term is so often used with pejorative connotations, however, I have purposely delimited its application. My sharply restricted use of the name reflects a conviction that the Fundamentalist movement should be understood as the historically-rooted obverse of the Liberal-Modernist movement and that no form of theological “conservatism” is ipso facto “Fundamentalist.” Accordingly I exclude Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, and J. Gresham Machen as well as contemporary theologians like Van Til, Berkouwer, Carnell et al, who are frequently referred to as Fundamentalists, or even so refer to themselves. To my mind, a person is not a Fundamentalist if he speaks to the issues, is aware of the problems, is well-informed, and is in communication with those from whom he dissents. I recognize that nobody can legislate the meaning of such a word; I merely wish to emphasize an important qualitative distinction between two types of conservatism.

4. I have described this Pious Utilitarianism more fully in The Pieties of Usefulness, Bulletin of Stetson University, DeLand, Florida, 1957Google Scholar, and in “The Levels of Religious Revival,” Confluence, IV (April, 1955), 32–43.Google Scholar

5. Koenker's, Ernest B.The Liturgical Renaissance in the Roman Catholic Church (University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar suggests one aspect of the subject which is here being left aside. Theological changes in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches of America are likewise not specifically considered, though both were much affected by the general tendencies which will be my primary concern.

6. Gabriel, Ralph Henry, The Course of American Democratic Thought, rev. ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Mead, Sidney E., “The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in America, 1607–1850,” in Niebuhr, H. Richard and Williams, Daniel D. (eds.), The Ministry in Historical Perspectives (New York: Harpers, 1956)Google Scholar and several other important essays there cited. Sweet's lifetime corpus might be seen as variations on this theme. Osborn, Ronald E., The Spirit of American Christianity (New York: Harpers, 1958)Google Scholar reflects even as it explains the phenomenon.

7. On “Neo-Orthodoxy” and Liberalism the literature is too vast to need references here; but see the surveys by Dillenberger, John and Welch, Claude, Protestant Christianity (New York: Scribners, 1955)Google Scholar; Williams, Daniel D., What Present-Day Theologians Are Thinking (New York: Harpers, 1952)Google Scholar; Frei, Hans, “Niebuhr's Theological Background,” in Paul, Ramsay (ed.), Faith and Ethics: The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Harpers, 1957)Google Scholar; and possibly my own “Neo - Orthodoxy Demythologized,” Christian Century, May 22, 1957.

8. See May, Henry F., Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harpers, 1949)Google Scholar; Carter, Paul A., The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954)Google Scholar. To my knowledge there is no adequate book on the American churches of “Only Yesterday.”

9. Quoted from Burckhardt's published letters by Löwith, Karl, Meaning In History (University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 24Google Scholar. See also Nichols, James H., “Introduction” to Burckhardt's essays: Force and Freedom, A Interpretation of History (New York: Meridian, 1955)Google Scholar; and also ch. xiii therein.

10. Overbeck, Franz (1837–1905), Christentum und Kultur, Bernouli, C. A., ed. (Basel, 1919).Google Scholar

11. No historical work I know of does justice to the great significance for theology of logical positivism, logical empiricism, and the various schools of philosophical analysis which the various phases of Wittgenstein's thought merely serve to suggest. See Mora, Jose Ferrater, “Wittgenstein, A Symbol of Troubled Times,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XIV (09, 1953), 89–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For summaries and bibliographies see Feigl, Herbert, “Logical Empiricism,” in Runes, Dagobert D. (ed.), Twentieth Century Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947)Google Scholar. The theological literature in this area of concern is, of course, large and growing; see Hick, John, Faith and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Mastall, E. L., Words and Images (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1957)Google Scholar, etc., and works there cited.

12. Heinemann, F. H., Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1958Google Scholar) contains a useful and up-to-date bibliography of the chief primary and secondary works as well as of other bibliographies.

13. Schweitzer's, Paul and his Interpreters (1st German edition, 1912Google Scholar) complemented the Quest; but already he was in training for his new vocation as a medical missionary. See his Out of my Life and Thought (New York: Holt, 1933; Mentor Book edition, 1953), esp. ch. x.Google Scholar

14. The new evangelical temper in New Testament exegesis and scholarship was probably best represented and advanced during the ‘Twenties’ and early ‘Thirties’ by Martin Dibelius, Rudolf Bultmann, and Karl Ludwig Schmidt.

15. See especially Tillieh's, The Religious Situation, Niebuhr, H. Richard, tr. (New York: Meridian-Living Age, 1956)Google Scholar and The Protestant Era, James Luther Adams, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948; Phoenix edition, 1957). Major mediating works on Swedish theology were Nels Ferré Swedish Contributions to Modern Theology (New York: Harpers, 1939)Google Scholar and Carlson, Edgar M., The Reinter pretation of Luther (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1948)Google Scholar. Probably no American book caught the spirit of the early Barthian movement better than Pauck's, WilhelmKarl Barth (New York: Harpers, 1931)Google Scholar. In 1933 Barth's, Romans appeared in English (Oxford).Google Scholar

16. The Word of God and the Word of Man (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1928Google Scholar; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1957), the latter edition with a new Foreword.

17. A year before, in an essay on “Religious Realism and the Twentieth Century,” in Macintosh, Douglas C. (ed.), Religions Realism (New York: Macmillan, 1913)Google Scholar that could almost have been published as an introduction to Tillich's The Religious Situation, Niebuhr made clear that Continental “realism” could very relevantly be brought to bear on the American scene. Indeed his own Social Sources of Denominationalism of 1929 (New York: Meridian-Living Age, 1957)Google Scholar had already made or implied much of its criticism.

18. See also Lowrie's, “Translators and Interpreters of S. K.,” Theology Today, XII (10, 1955), pp. 312–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Come Holy Spirit (New York: Round Table Press, 1934)Google Scholar contains sermons by Barth and Eduard Thurneysen.

20. Creative Controversies in Christianity (New York: Revell, 1928), pp. 217–18.Google Scholar

21. Religion and Life (Fall, 1933)Google Scholar; A Christian Manifesto (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1934), p. 227.Google Scholar

22. Horton, , Realistic Theology (New York: Harpers, 1934), p. 120.Google Scholar

23. Niebuhr, , An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harpers, 1935Google Scholar; Meridian-Living Age, 1956), p. 43.

24. There are useful survey-essays in Nash, Arnold S. (ed.), Protestant Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1951)Google Scholar; see also Smith, H. Shelton, Faith and Nurture (New York: Scribners, 1941).Google Scholar

25. Whether editors and contributors to the widely-read denominational and nondenominational periodicals contributed to or merely reflected the communications-breakdown is difficult to say; probably both. The probability that they contributed to it, however, should engender caution in the present day, especially because journalism now as always thrives on conflict.

26. Bayne, Stephen Fielding, The Optional God, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Mead, Sidney E., review of Carter's Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel, in Church History, XXVI (12, 1957), 397 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar