If the Bible constitutes ultimate authority for Protestants (sola scriptura) and yet is not self-interpreting, which secondary authorities may they rely on for understanding divine revelation? For American Unitarians, as Lydia Willsky-Ciollo shows, the supplemental source was free inquiry – ‘the inner voices of reason and conscience’ (p. xvii). In conventional renderings of Unitarianism, the movement formed in reaction to doctrinal and ecclesiological controversies (George Willis Cooke, Earl Morse Wilbur, Sydney Ahlstrom and Conrad Wright). Willsky-Ciollo, by instead placing the accent on religious authority, demonstrates how Unitarians constructively moulded their theological identity, setting her study apart from both confessional accounts (David Robinson's being the standard treatment) and recent work on southern (John Macaulay) and transatlantic (J. D. Bowers) Unitarianism. In pushing out the bounds of Unitarian historiography, Willsky-Ciollo contributes to a growing conversation that investigates the ‘crisis of authority’ within American Christianity (notably, Molly Worthen, Mark Noll and Amy Kittelstrom). For Willsky-Ciollo, Unitarians’ understanding of religious authority and pursuit of truth is representative of the American Protestant experience: ‘the Unitarian story is the Protestant story’ (p. xvi).
Based on lectures, correspondence, journals, sermons and treatises, American Unitarianism and the Protestant dilemma begins by tracing the long historical arc concerning biblical authority from the late medieval period to the nineteenth century, underscoring the intellectual revolution that enlightenment rationalism brought to religious thought. As Willsky-Ciollo explains, particularly important for understanding American Unitarianism are antecedents that privileged the synthesis of Bible and reason: Socinianism, Deism, the Latitudinarianism of Samuel Clarke and Richard Price, and the Scottish Common Sense Realism of Thomas Reid. But most significant for the movement in America was Jonathan Edwards, whom Willsky-Ciollo (following Perry Miller) regards as the ‘connective bridge’ between seventeenth-century Puritans and nineteenth-century liberal Christianity because of Edwards's gravitation towards latitudinarian modes of biblical interpretation and Lockean epistemology (p. 23).
The heart of the book entails a close examination of key personalities and their intellectual quests. Using four figures – William Ellery Channing, Andrews Norton, Theodore Parker and Frederic Henry Hedge – Willsky-Ciollo charts the development in Unitarian thought ‘from a firmly biblical faith to one replete with multiple authorities’ (p. xix). Channing's thought, most fully expressed in his lightning-rod Baltimore sermon (1819), demonstrates the primacy of the Bible in cultivating one's mind (‘self-culture’) to connect with the divine mind. The sermon pointed not to Trinitarianism as the major difference between Unitarianism and traditional Christianity, but to the doctrines of original sin and election, which seemed to run counter to reason. Meanwhile, Norton, who was a professor, not a pastor like Channing, Parker and Hedge, aimed to educate minds, focusing on the poetics of language and philology to uncover the true meaning of the text.
Theodore Parker, especially with his controversial 1841 South Boston sermon (‘The transient and the permanent in Christianity’), set Unitarianism on a more radical course. Willsky-Ciollo pinpoints Parker's radicalisation to two key events: the influence of German Higher Critics and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838. As Parker probed the nature of biblical versus intuitive truth, he relocated Scripture's importance to its capacity to inspire people. According to Willsky-Ciollo, the Parker controversy exposed ‘the quintessential Protestant problem … that the Bible was one and could only be one of a set of viable authorities’ (pp. 156–7). Whereas Channing and Norton remained tethered to biblical authority and Parker swung in an opposing direction toward ‘absolute religion’ with the self as the first authority, Hedge – influenced by Kant – emphasised the authority of and intuition imparted by the Spirit. Hedge sought to address the growing crisis over authority by establishing the Unitarian Church itself as a principal source of authority. His vision of a ‘broad church’ containing all Christians aimed to hold together the Bible and the Spirit, the rational and the mystical.
The final substantive chapter and epilogue turn to long-term trajectories. Case studies of Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Orestes Brownson and Caroline Dall illustrate Unitarian experimentation with religious authority between the first and last National Conference of Unitarian Churches (1865–94). Abbot's Free Religion yoked theology to scientific discovery, thus vaulting science to ultimate authority. In contrast to Abbot's liberalism, Brownson found the self and rationality wanting as sources of authority and turned to Catholicism. Dall channelled her Transcendentalist-Unitarianism to social activism among women in New England and New York. In the twentieth century, as Unitarianism became imbued with John Dietrich's humanism and merged with Universalism, persistent questions of authority accentuated the divide between Unitarian Universalism and the Christian past.
The book's chief contributions are two-fold. First, it offers a fresh interpretation of American Unitarianism, propelled forward by issues of religious authority in pursuit of divine truth. Second, the book chronicles the development of the movement over the course of the nineteenth century: the seminal decade of the 1820s, change in openness to multiple authorities between the 1840s and the 1860s, and experimentation in the later 1800s. In so doing, Willsky-Ciollo seeks to relocate Unitarians as ‘central players’ rather than ‘outliers’ in the telling of American Christianity – and Protestantism more broadly (p. xxiii).
Some questions remain. Sola gratia and sola fide as core features of the Protestant story that are lacking in Unitarianism (at least in this account) seem to limit Unitarianism's representativeness. Moreover, one wonders how this intellectually elite expression of Christianity translated to the typical mid nineteenth-century Christian in the United States. If making an argument for the representativeness of the Unitarian story to American Protestant Christianity, reception matters: to what extent did the common believer experience a ‘conundrum of biblical authority’? How is Willsky-Ciollo's story related, for example, to issues of authority and interpretation in the ‘Second Great Awakening’ and broader currents in American religion during the early republic? And what implications did Unitarianism's self-as-authority have for social reform, most notably in the narrative of abolitionism and biblical authority, where Unitarians figured prominently?
Yet Willsky-Ciollo succeeds in shining new light on Protestantism's relationship to scriptural authority – its supposed hallmark. Unitarians were perhaps more aware and explicit in perceiving the problem of biblical authority than their denominational peers. If credo-historical Christianity is the orienting grid, Unitarians are a fringe group. But if the American Protestant crisis of authority is the prime story under investigation, Unitarians are closer to the nucleus. That is, taking epistemology as the starting point instead of theology, Willsky-Ciollo shows that nineteenth-century Unitarians were engaged with an issue at the heart of the American religious story. Scholars of religion, biblical interpretation and US intellectual history will all find this of immense interest. For historians of religion in particular, it will challenge how nineteenth-century Christian thinkers navigated truth-seeking in relation to historic belief.
