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Dissent in American Religion
By Edwin Scott Gaustad.
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1973. 184 pp. $6.95.

American Religious Thought: A History
By William A. Clebsch
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1973, 212 pp. $6.95.

Gaustad's book deals with what is, especially for Americans, the very important subject of dissent. In a highly pluralistic society such as that of the United States, with no established church, what is the criterion of "dissent"? Is it lack of age, or of size, or of prestige? The author gives a more suggestive answer. "Religion in its essence," he says, "is already offbeat, irregular, asymmetric… yet … religious institutions do make their peace with the world… so the prophet contends against the priest" (p. 4). Thus conceived, dissent is an effort to recover a lost dynamism. But at other times it may represent a conservative reaction, a movement "toward the center once more" (p. 149), presumably sometimes toward an imaginary "past" that never really did exist. Both the editor of this series, Martin E. Marty, and the author point out the important connections between religious dissent and political and cultural change.

Every society is subject simultaneously to forces making for unity and for disunity, and the author, who is basically sympathetic to the constructive potential of dissent, notes that dissent can sometimes become dysfunctional (p. 2). But this is the price of an "open" as compared with a "closed" society, and it is abundantly worth the cost.

By far the largest part of the volume is devoted to very brief descriptions of individual "dissenting religious bodies," under nearly a score of very diverse headings. Of course, a synthesis-other than the author's suggestive discussion from time to time of the nature of dissent itself-is quite impossible. Though very many of these movements are familiar to the general reader, the author says something concise and distinctive about each and often introduces new material, producing an interesting and informative volume.

Clebsch, in writing here on the history of the philosophy of religion in America, concentrates principally on three figures-Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. He finds all three abandoning the "moralistic spirituality" of Puritanism in favor of an "aesthetic spirituality," which be construes as the main line of American religious philosophy. American philosophy of religion, he notes, has been person centered, as these thinkers "typically adjusted their ideas of deity to religious experience, not vice versa." By

384 - Dissent in American Religion & American Religious Thought: A History

"aesthetic spirituality" the author means "living in harmony with divine things-in a word being at home in the universe."

To whom does Jonathan Edwards "really" belong? Of course, as with everything in the public domain, his ideas, like stones left from an ancient building, are available to anyone who can fit them into his own structure. But who are Edwards' true heirs? The fact of course is that, like Martin Luther, he is vastly larger than any who have claimed his name. Long ago Vernon L. Parrington lamented that so fine a mind as Edwards' was "wasted" because of its strict Christian particularism. Later Perry Miller showed more clearly than predecessors had done the universal significance that can be opened up when this particularism is bypassed. Clebsch has concentrated on Edwards' The Nature of True Virtue, in which Edwards borrowed heavily from Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson the suggestive parallelism between virtue ("benevolence") and aesthetic harmony. But Edwards made this idea distinctively Christian by saying that only the regenerate Christian can go beyond "the love of complacence" toward an object that is not intrinsically lovable. By eliminating this note of particularism that Edwards made central, Clebsch is able to restore the universalized aestheticism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and to build on it. But is this Edwards with the sage of Northampton omitted? Certainly the idea that remains, whether it is the "real" Edwards or not, is highly perceptive, and Clebsch makes excellent use of it.

"Nature," variously conceived, was a central concern of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and Emerson was a leading exponent in America of this interest. For him "aesthetic harmony" took the form of "a new American religiousness" and consisted in being "at peace with nature," nature being defined as "the metaphor of God and mankind." Clebsch suggests that Emerson was a humanist, but not a naturalist or a pantheist.

The treatment of William James is accompanied by an illuminating summary of his father's influence on him. In writing about James himself the author brings out clearly both his pluralism and his pragmatism, as well as his great impact on twentieth-century American religious thought. Perhaps the influence on such a figure as H. Richard Niebuhr from James's idea of creating reality by believing is overemphasized at the expense of the influence of Barth's existentialism on Niebuhr.

One detects in the volume a note of condescension toward church theology in favor of the philosophy of religion. Certainly the value of the philosophy of religion is indisputable. Being more abstract and universal in its intent than theology, it can relate basic characteristics of religiousness to broad social and cultural trends and thus-quite incidentally to its own purpose-greatly aid Christian theology in studying its own relation to the cultural environment. But it can never be a substitute for theology's vital task of relating the Christian heritage to the contemporary worshiping community.

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Clebsch has written a stimulating book which sparks many fresh ideas and vital questions. One looks forward to the further volumes in this "Chicago History of American Religion" series.

Lefferts A. Loetscher
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey