I am grateful for this rich and sumptuously detailed book by Elizabeth A. Clark on a neglected subject. Her splendid book is a reminder that although the early twentieth-century liberal and modernist scholars of early Christian history are largely forgotten—and tend to be derided when remembered—they strove with integrity and intelligence to be good historicists. I appreciate that the liberals of this period wanted Christianity to play a constructive role in society and tried to secure a place in the academy for the study of early Christian history. Still, they believed so intently in the superiority of their white middle-class culture that they could not see this belief as a form of prejudice.
I am going to begin with a couple of framing points that will allow me to cut swiftly to my points. The gods of modern theology are Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher. In the nineteenth century, each of them had a school of theological followers, and there were various mediating theology fusions of Kant and Hegel, Kant and Schleiermacher, Hegel and Schleiermacher, and all three together. In Germany, “liberal” meant Kantian because the Kantians claimed exclusive ownership of the name. This term acquired a wider usage in Germany only through the mediating theologies, especially the Ritschlian school. In England, “liberal” meant Unitarian or Latitudinarian until the late nineteenth century, when Broad church rationalists claimed it. In the United States, it mostly meant Unitarian until the Ritschlian school produced American Ritschlians. This is why Shirley Jackson Case and Shailer Mathews avoided the liberal name. They did not want to be associated with Unitarians and they did not have A. C. McGiffert's Ritschlian reasons for calling themselves liberals.
The schools of Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher appropriated historical criticism just enough to get around it. They were in the inoculation business, trumping historical consciousness with a claim about the unconditioned ground of freedom and moral obligation (Kant), the self-revealing and self-reflecting process of differentiation and reconciliation (Hegel), or the wellspring of religion in spiritual experience (Schleiermacher). Ritschl said theology needed to embrace historical consciousness, reclaim the kingdom-oriented religion of Jesus, accept Kant's division of knowledge, and defend the indispensable role of religion in society. The school he founded swept the field of theology by doing these four things, even as Ritschlian theologians clashed with each other over their foundations.
The Ritschlian school built on the heritage of Luther, Kant, and Schleiermacher by stressing the autonomy of faith, now meshed with the new social consciousness. It was practical, antimetaphysical, and comfortably ensconced in the churches, academy, and government. It provided theological ballast for Germany's expanding empire and was avowedly comfortable with Germany's mighty growing army. The German Ritschlians battled over historicism, judging that Ritschl got it approximately right (Harnack), took it much too far (Herrmann), or did not take it far enough (Troeltsch). They battled over Ritschl's attempt to expunge metaphysics from theology, judging that he got it right (Harnack), did not go far enough (Herrmann), or was wrong to try (Troeltsch). German Ritschlian theology projected a sunny, confident progressivism that made peace with science and made Christianity useful. McGiffert and William Adams Brown studied under Harnack, channeled his confident liberal theology, and brought it to Union Seminary. But it turned out that the German Ritschlians had no unifying beliefs. They battled fiercely during the very period that McGiffert launched his career. Then the actual basis of German Ritschlian unity was exposed for all the world to see. It was Culture Protestant nationalism, which crashed in mighty catastrophe after World War I, taking down nearly the entire tradition of liberal theology.
One could make a case that the best Ritschlians were Americans. Walter Rauschenbusch brilliantly employed Ritschlian arguments for the social gospel but with democratic socialist politics. Clark provides ample evidence that McGiffert was a pretty good Ritschlian. He raised the level of American scholarly discourse about the early church. He shredded pious lore about the redemptive achievements of early Christianity. He told Union students that the early church did not improve the moral character of the Roman Empire, and it was not much of an intellectual force either. Christianity conquered the empire primarily as a mystery religion featuring the promise of individual immortality. McGiffert broadened Harnack's focus on church doctrine to the history of Christian thought, rightly discarded Harnack's glib distinction between kernel and husk, and recognized that no historical period is a mere rung on a ladder.
But McGiffert fully absorbed a shallow form of Kantian dualism from the Ritschlian school. He taught the American textbook version of Kant as a subjective idealist who established the Kantian impasse between knowing subjects and whatever is real. McGiffert skipped over the sections of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment in which the Kantian categories were intersubjective conditions of experience, not objects within experience. The Kantian categories constitute an intersubjective order that is the necessary condition of any ideas that the individual mind may have. Union students were not told that Kant might be read as being closer to Hegel and Schelling than to Berkeley and Hume because McGiffert had everything at stake in practical Kantian dualism.
The upshot was devastating for liberal Protestantism. The Ritschlian school fatefully severed love from justice and power by reducing love to emotion. It banished ontology from theology and lived off culture religion, a mere husk. It taught students to pity the church fathers who puzzled over metaphysical problems. What a colossal waste, McGiffert told them. The early church should have concentrated on service, as he put it; practiced the social gospel, as Rauschenbusch said; or touted its function in society, as Case said. At least McGiffert grappled to some degree with philosophers and urged Union students to do so as well. Case took pride in being antiphilosophical; he saw no problem with the fact that he was a church historian who could not track a philosophical argument. When Case read Alfred North Whitehead's book Religion in the Making, he somehow considered himself qualified to judge that the book was gibberish.
Case had similar convictions about theology, so my trilogy on liberal theology gave him short shrift. Clark gives an excellent rendering of Case's career and compares him effectively to McGiffert and LaPiana. I would press harder than she does on how the Chicago School shaped his development of the social-historical method. When Case joined the faculty in 1908, the Chicago School was already identified with historicism, scientific empiricism, functionalism, naturalism, pragmatism, and ultramodernism. George Burman Foster, Shailer Mathews, Gerald Birney Smith, and Edward Scribner Ames wrote bellwether works that defined what Chicago theology was about. Mathews made a case for modernist historicism that Case adopted and developed. Mathews and Case adopted the history of religion focus on the particularities of historical periods and the interrelationships of cultural structures. They agreed with Troeltsch that the best way to understand any religion is to study the historical milieu and social process in which it developed. But even Troeltsch compensated for his loss of a scale-oriented theory by emphasizing crises and breakthroughs in consciousness.
Troeltsch was a neo-Kantian personal idealist until very near the end of his life. Case and Mathews focused on institutions and dared to be boring, refusing to idealize the past or construe the present as decadent. They did not pretend to regard the early church's struggles over the Trinity and the Incarnation as gripping intellectual problems. Functional explanations were fully sufficient to them. The church needed some doctrines to secure social solidarity itself. Christianity survived because it “functioned” sufficiently smoothly.
Liberal theology has a pronounced history to be the discourse of a privileged white elite. In much of the world that is all it has ever been, with no pretense that liberals should join struggles for social justice. In the United States, distinctly, liberal theology fused with a more-or-less progressive social gospel. Here, theological liberals claimed to support social justice causes, more or less. But Clark's book is a reminder that the American liberal church historians were on the “less” side of this formulation. McGiffert did not share Rauschenbusch's passion for social justice; he was closer to Harnack's paternalistic elitism. Case persisted, into the 1940s, with the same quaint jargon about functions, adjustments, and cultural progress that he spieled before the empires clashed in World War I and the Great Depression ravaged an entire generation. He puzzled that Chicago School theology, being so modern, could become so marginal in the field of theology.
The Chicago School, however, was formative for several Black social gospel leaders, notably John Hope, Richard Wright Jr., Monroe Work, Mordecai Johnson, and Benjamin Mays. Mays wrote two books that bore the imprint of his training under Case and Edwin Aubrey. Both are landmarks in church history: The Negro's Church and The Negro's God. Case's greatest contribution to American religion was that he influenced Benjamin Mays. But that would have seemed an outlandish statement to Shirley Jackson Case.
