Theology Today - Vol 42, No. 4 - January 1986 - BOOK REVIEW - Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey

543 - Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey

Churchmen and Philosophers:
From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey
By Bruce Kuklick
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985. 311 pp. $27.50.

A professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a 1977 study on The Rise of American Philosophy, Bruce Kuklick here turns his attention to major developments in American theology between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. The present work might well have been subtitled "the demise of American theology," for it argues persuasively that during the early twentieth century, philosophers largely took over not only the central intellectual issues, but also the key cultural roles formerly dominated by churchmen.

During "The Reign of Theology, 1746-1828" (Part I of the book) the thought of Jonathan Edwards dominated New England Congregational Calvinism through what came to be called the New England Theology, "the most sustained intellectual tradition in the United States." In his fine two-chapter exposition, Kuklick does justice to the philosophical and theological complexities of Edwards' position. Influenced by Locke, "Edwards was an empiricist. But he also believed that the supernatural was conveyed in experience: he was an experimental Calvinist." As such he affirmed, and his New England followers continued to affirm, "two crucial dualisms":

The first, between God and man, evidenced that God was sovereign and mysterious. The second connected to the first. The dualism between nature and the supernatural was necessary … to belief in (natural) man's depravity and the (supernatural) giving of grace.

These two Calvinistic-Edwardsean dualisms were seriously compromised by Horace Bushnell during "An Era of Transition, 1800-1867" (Part II), and later repudiated by the "Progressive Orthodoxy" established at Andover Seminary in the 1880s. By these "Andover Liberals,"

God was conceived as present, living in the forces of nature and human history. Revelation was ongoing and interrupted. The constant interaction between God and man, infinite and finite, was a "communion."

Andover's New Theology contributed in two important ways to "The Triumph of Philosophy, 1849-1934" (the final Part of the book), according to Kuklick. First, it "circumvented the categories of the orthodoxy of Edwards' followers without clearly stating its own." Second, it proposed a theological program that was later taken over and pursued, in naturalistic philosophical categories, by American philosophy, specifically, by John Dewey.

Three themes of the New Theology structured Dewey's thought throughout his life. Like Andover, Dewey heralded science as the method of philosophy. With the new theologians he also controverted the dichotomies between God

544 - Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey

and man and between the natural and the supernatural. For him, God was incorporated in humanity, and spirit in nature.

"My key argument," Kuklick writes in his Introduction, is "that there are continuities that take us from Edwards to Dewey." It seems that Kuklick has not stated his own argument with the same care and precision he has employed in his exposition of other authors. For these "continuities that take us from Edwards to Dewey" refer, apparently, not to continuities with Edwards' own position, nor with traditional reinterpreters of Edwards, but rather to affinities between Dewey and the Andover Liberals who explicitly repudiate the Edwardsean tradition. Dewey, as Kuklick says at the end of his book, "had thought literate America out of the categories of Jonathan Edwards."

As he was in his previous work on American philosophy, the author is attentive to the social context in which theological and philosophical ideas were developed, accepted, and abandoned. Scattered throughout the book are provocative paragraphs concerning such topics as the professionalization of theological and philosophical education, the rise of the modern university, and the way in which the changing assumptions of one's "audience" lead to changing intellectual styles and even changing truths. As a committed intellectual historian, however, the author warns against reducing a concept to its social context. "Sometimes ideas fit the social order, sometimes they do not; at no time is the connection simple, and occasionally it cannot be fathomed."

William H. Becker
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania