|
436 - The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America |
The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism
and Protestant Thought in Britain and America
By Charles D. Cashdollar
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989. 489 pp. $35.00.
Accounts of Protestant theology in the nineteenth century often turn on issues such as Darwinism and biblical criticism. Charles Cashdollar, Professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, argues that these matters were not central but secondary, that, in fact, they produced controversy largely because they were associated with what many believed to be a more fundamental threat to Christian belief-positivism. The term, coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) to describe his thought, soon acquired a broader meaning as contemporaries fused Comtean notions with those of other thinkers, especially John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. In this expanded meaning, positivism became, in the words of one nineteenth-century observer, "not simply the system of Comte, as he elaborated it, but a tendency of thought of which his system is one example, perhaps the leading one." This "tendency of thought," argues Casbdollar, exhibited several major features. First, following Hume and Kant, positivism limited knowledge to phenomena. The human intellect was incompetent to probe behind or beyond the observable facts of the world, and thus supernatural religion and metaphysics were highly suspect. Second, positivism asserted that consciousness had an historical development, human knowledge having evolved through various stages until now at length persons could surrender outdated theological conceptions of the world in favor of "positive," that is, scientific, understandings. Third, positivism sought a science of human relations-sociology, Comte called it-which could address social problems with rigorous precision and serve as the basis for the reconstruction of society. Finally, positivism wished to take the energies devoted to the worship of a transcendent God and invest them in humanity itself. According to Cashdollar, it was this constellation of ideas, symbolized most powerfully by Comte, that constituted the major intellectual challenge to Protestant thought during the nineteenth century.
After a lengthy and meticulous examination of the transmission of positivism in Britain and America, the author devotes the second part of the book to an analysis of the ways in which theology was transformed by contact with the new ideas. Only a handful of individuals eagerly promoted a full-blown Comtean religion of humanity or even drew major inspiration from the French theorist, but many did modify their theologies in response to the positivist challenge. "Judicious conservatives" shifted apologetic strategy to draw more evidence for Christianity from historical phenomena (especially from comparative
|
|
437 - The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America |
religions), to deemphasize notions of special or miraculous providence, and to place heightened emphasis upon the social message of Christianity. Liberal Protestants, while rejecting positivist epistemology in favor of more idealistic views, responded wholeheartedly to other positivist themes and proved even more willing than the "judicious conservatives" to surrender supernaturalist understandings of the faith and to espouse a social gospel stressing the solidarity of the human race. Nor did hidebound reactionaries who utterly rejected Comte escape his power. Cashdollar finds in their headlong flight to church authority or biblical literalism evidence that they, too, had felt the chill of Comtean ideas. In short, whether by stimulating emulation, modification, or outright rejection, positivist notions helped to determine the shape of theological discourse.
Casbdollar's excellent book raises important questions. Since, by his own estimation, positivism quickly came to include a variety of modern intellectual trends (some antedating Comte), one must ask whether it, as a discrete or clearly identifiable movement, had the influence Cashdollar's work suggests. Indeed, one might argue that the ideas he identifies as positivist were actually a series of aftershocks to the more fundamental intellectual earthquake produced by the Enlightenment in the previous century. Some readers may also feel that the author has
|
|
438 - The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America |
overstated the extent to which Protestants' assessments of positivism determined their reaction to biblical criticism and Darwinism. In any event, those questions merit further examination. Yet, minor reservations aside, Cashdollar has produced a superb work. His exhaustively researched Transformation of Theology now constitutes the most comprehensive treatment of Anglo-American Protestant thought in the nineteenth century. Moreover, he has succeeded in providing a genuinely new angle of vision from which to view the subject. All future interpreters must reckon with Cashdollar's major contribution,
James H. Moorhead
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey