418 - The Transcendentalist Minister: Church Reform in the New England Land Renaissance

The Transcendentalist Minister: Church Reform in the New England Land Renaissance
By William R. Hutchison
240 pp. New R"

The Transcendentalists-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parks James Freeman Clarke, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, William Henry Channing, Frederic H. Hodge-are familiar figures of the American past. The author of this present book, which was awarded, Brewer Prize by the American Society of Church History, suggests there are two reasons why a new account of the mid-nineteenth cent struggle between the "orthodox" and "Transcendentalist" wings

419 - The Transcendentalist Minister: Church Reform in the New England Land Renaissance

American Unitarianism was needed. First of all, the earlier studies of Transcendentalism were based almost exclusively upon materials supplied by the Transcendentalist & themselves, with the result that their opponents-the "orthodox" Unitarians-have been tin unjustly caricatured. In the second place, the Transcendentalists have been commonly pictured as free spirits who manifest little or no interest in the Church, whereas actually one of their main concerns was church reform.

With regard to the reassessment of the "orthodox" Unitarians, Hutchinson is successful in demonstrating that they were far from being intolerant reactionaries, even though Andrews Norton did have his choleric moments. Norton, on the other hand, found his counterpart in Theodore Parker who also tended to be illiberal and dogmatic in temper and who did not hesitate to accuse those who differed with him of being insincere, superstitious, and bigoted. Hutchison also demonstrates that the Transcendentalists were not interested solely in appraising the universe through the spectacles of an intuitive faith, for they were deeply involved in an attempt to reform the Church so that it might express more adequately the implications of their "transcendental" faith. Most of the Transcendentalist leaders were ministers who continued in the ministry and were deeply preoccupied with the everyday problems of church life. A major portion of the volume is devoted to a description of the innovations they made in the Churches they served and to the patterns they formulated for the Church of the Future, the Church of the People, the Comprehensive Church, the Broad Church, the New, True, and Final Church. These Transcendentalist blueprints of the Church of the Future are strikingly prophetic of the Churches of twentieth century subburbia in which religion in general is exalted.

The author points out that the basic dilemma of Unitarianism was that it sought to combine an insistence upon free inquiry with an acceptance of a specifically Christian confession as normative. The "orthodox" Unitarians wished to limit "free inquiry" within the bounds of the initial Unitarian commitment to revealed Christianity, but the Transcendentalists insisted that any concept of the superior authority of a special Christian revelation inhibited freedom of inquiry. The Transcendentalists took their stance upon the authority of a general revelation [in the natural order intuitively apprehended by discrete individuals, and the "orthodox" found it difficult to counter their claim that they had a "right" as Unitarians to do so. Ultimately the Transcendentalists found themselves in much the same position as the "orthodox" when they

420 - The Transcendentalist Minister: Church Reform in the New England Land Renaissance

sought to counter the claim of the "scientific theists" to have a place within the Unitarian fold, and they both were to be equally helpless in the face of a similar claim by "non-theistic humanists". Thus, Hutchison concludes, the logical development of the first "historic ideal" of Unitarianism led to a virtually complete rejection of the second.

Winthrop S. Hudson
Colgate Rochester Divinity School
Rochester, New York