Willsky-Ciollo argues that the development of New England Unitarianism and Transcendentalism “was grounded in a constructive and dynamic mission to construct a liberal Christian understanding of religious authority” (xix), particularly of the Bible. She is right, and her book serves as a useful corrective to much writing on these movements, particularly Transcendentalism, which tends to downplay or overlook the issue of biblical authority. She also argues, more broadly, that the story of Unitarians and the Bible is representative of Protestantism as a whole: “Unitarianism was quintessentially Protestant in origin in the stalwart attempts of its founders to make the Bible the touchstone of their Christian identity, only to be betrayed by the implications of their particular hermeneutics. Thus, the rise and fall of biblical authority in the nascent Unitarian movement of the early to mid-nineteenth century is a microhistory of how biblical authority works in a Protestant denomination” (xvi).
She builds her book around a series of case studies, each examining the distinctive biblical thought of a prominent New England Unitarian of the nineteenth century. She devotes full chapters to William Ellery Channing, Andrews Norton, Theodore Parker, and Frederic Henry Hedge, and in another chapter, looks at Frances Ellingwood Abbott, Orestes Brownson, and Caroline Healey Dall. Willsky-Ciollo places each of these figures in relation to the New England Transcendentalist movement, either as a forerunner (Channing), opponent (Norton), member (Parker, Hedge, and Dall), or dissenter (Abbott and Brownson).
She presents Channing as championing a combined faith in the miraculous authority of the Bible and of human spiritual potential, manifested in the ability to read scripture “rationally,” as the basis for universal Christian fellowship, while Norton attempted to use the same combination combatively, to bring down all those he considered the enemies of liberal Christianity. She portrays Parker as a pivotal figure, who changed the Unitarian conversation on the Bible by rejecting the idea of miraculous biblical inspiration in favor of a Transcendentalist vision of universal divine inspiration, of which the Bible was but one manifestation. She contrasts Parker, who used Transcendentalist ideas to attack traditional concepts of biblical and church authority, with Hedge, who tried to reconcile those ideas with those concepts. Both Abbot and Brownson, meanwhile, each rejected Transcendentalism, but for different reasons: Abbot because he wanted to move beyond the idea of divine inspiration altogether and build a wholly “scientific” theology; Brownson because he came to reject the basic Protestant distinction between scriptural and church authority and converted to Catholicism. Finally, Dall embraced the Transcendentalist idea that biblical authority was not exclusive, while never ceasing to rely on the Bible, both personally and in her public discourse, as she pursued feminist reforms. Willsky-Ciollo argues that in the twenty-first century, many Unitarian Universalists embrace the Bible in the spirit of Dall: “Instead of measuring authority by how well it satisfied the question of ‘how do I find saving truth’ Dall began by asking of her Bible, ‘how does this apply to me now? How does this empower myself and others?’” (245).
Willsky-Ciollo examines the thought of each of her subjects with sophistication and care. Especially welcome are her essays on Norton—she presents an excellent account of his biblical criticism—and on Hedge, Abbot, and Dall, because they deserve more scholarly attention than they have received. Willsky-Ciollo's essay on Parker correctly recognizes his importance, but would have benefited from a closer examination of his major works of biblical criticism, and a clearer acknowledgement that his view of scriptural authority continued to evolve throughout his career. For example, in his famous sermon on “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841), he insisted that the historical Jesus had actually preached what Parker called the “Absolute Religion,” but by the mid-1850s, he had ceased to believe this.
Willsky-Ciollo develops her broader point, about Protestantism and the Bible, principally in an ambitious opening chapter, a valuable survey of the subject from “the Reformation to American Unitarianism” (1). She argues that when Protestants established their central doctrine of sola scriptura, separating the authority of the Bible from that of the church, they created a problem for themselves: Who had the authority to interpret scripture, and on what basis? Reformers tried to work around this difficulty with the claim that the meaning of the Bible was obvious to all, but clashing interpretations nonetheless proliferated. Willsky-Ciollo shows that the validity of these different interpretations could only be debated by appeals to sources of authority outside scripture, such as science, rationality, or individual reason. She in effect argues that these debates, although developing from the doctrine of sola scriptura, necessarily undermined it, and with it, the doctrine of miraculous biblical authority itself.
Willsky-Ciollo's argument here is interesting, but not entirely convincing. Were Protestant ideas about scripture really so unstable? Although Unitarianism was a self-consciously Protestant movement, and most Unitarians eventually did abandon the idea of miraculous scriptural authority, most Protestant believers never did so. Again, if she is right about the instability of biblical interpretation in Protestantism, how much was due to the doctrine of sola scriptura, and how much to other factors?
Still, Willsky-Ciollo has made a valuable contribution to both Unitarian history and to the history of American culture. If debates over biblical authority were at the core of the New England Transcendentalist movement, as she demonstrates, then they were at the center of nineteenth-century American intellectual and literary life.
