Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness

Grant Wacker

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781481310758
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

At the end of the nineteenth century, Augustus Strong emerged as one of the most influential church leaders and theologians in America. But, as Grant Wacker reveals in this masterful study, Strong also proved to be as tragic a figure as he was influential.

Strong was forced to choose between conceptual worlds that were, to him, equally incompatible and compelling. Strong wrestled with how the critical study of history, exemplified in the method commonly called "historicism" (or "historical consciousness"), can be reconciled with the many ahistorical assumptions embedded in the claims of traditional Christianity. Is the notion of human sinfulness, for example, simply an artifact of time and place? Or does it carry an underlying truth that endures, independent of the biblical context and interpretation of classic Christian thinkers?Strong acquired a historical awareness considered rare among conservative scholars. Despite cultivating this historical sensibility, he struggled with its implications. In the end, Wacker writes, Strong "clung to the conviction that the faith once delivered unto the fathers somehow stands above the vicissitudes of history, even as he became increasingly conscious that all things human are fragile creations of time and place."This edition, complete with a new preface, reveals why Strong remains relevant today. Strong, though a man of his time, illustrates the perennial conflict created by competing interests of theology and history, a conflict that still torments those who seek to be faithful to the obligations of both the church and academy.

Chapter One

Made in the Image of History: The Epistemic Revolution of the Late Nineteenth Century

IN 1936 PROFESSOR JOHN GRESHAM MACHEN of Westminster Theological Seminary published a series of radio lectures on the role of Christian faith in the modern world. Although Machen disliked the label, he was regarded by many as the leading scholarly spokesman for fundamentalism in America. The sermonettes Machen prepared for the occasion dealt with subjects of popular theological interest, such as the nature of revelation and the nature of God. But one address, significantly titled “Life Founded upon Truth,” shed considerable light on the presuppositions underlying all the others. It dealt with the nature of truth.1

The argument of the address was that truth is timeless and immutable, independent of historical conditioning. This, said Machen, is what separates the “Christian view” of truth from the modern view. The central error of the latter is that it “denies that there is any possibility of attaining to a truth which will always be true.” It assumes that truth is relative to time and place, “truth . . . for this generation and truth for that generation, but no truth for all generations.” Moreover the modern view imagines that there are different truths for the “different races co-existing today.” Thus there is “an Oriental mind or an Occidental mind,” a “truth for this race and truth for that race, but no truth for all races.” Indeed, the modern view supposes that human understanding is so tied to particular circumstances that even the meanings of words wobble from century to century and from culture to culture. The flaw in this outlook, said Machen, is transparent: “Truth is not relative but absolute.” His position was unequivocal: There is no such thing as an “ancient mind or a medieval mind or a modern mind.” Indeed, such notions come “very near being nonsense.” Scripture is unambiguous about the matter, for it “makes truth the foundation of conduct and doctrine the foundation of life.” Christian doctrine is not a managed currency subject to human experience, but a gold standard that stands above the flux of history, independent of the passing generations and varying cultures of mankind. Truth does not grow out of human experience but precedes it.” Truth before conduct,” he insisted, “doctrine before life.”2

Machen’s essay tells us a great deal about his general philosophy of history, for it is clear that in his mind history is irrelevant to the things that really matter in life. This is not to say that he lacked a “sense of history,” if by that we mean a keen interest in the events of the past, especially the events recorded in Scripture. The point rather is that for Machen the meaning of historical events is not forged within history but ascribed from outside, anterior to and independent of the process. In his mind the past is simply the passage of time, a succession of temporal segments having no organic relation to the formation of society and culture. Machen’s world was filled with people and issues drawn from the past, but ultimately, it was a “world without history.”3

Machen was a superbly trained classicist and, by common agreement, a man of intimidating intelligence. Walter Lippmann warned fellow humanists as well as theological liberals that they should pay him closer attention. Even so, there was a bit of perversity in Lippmann’s admonition, for in Henry May’s words Lippmann himself had long been “cheerfully laying dynamite in the hidden cracks . . . of nineteenth-century America.”4

The premises of Lippmann’s contrasting view of the world were classically articulated in A Preface to Morals, published the year of the Great Crash. In this influential essay Lippmann forthrightly declared that the older feelings of certainty had crumbled for every one “who comes within the orbit of modernity.” The thoughtful person of today looks to science for the explanation of existence, but science does not pretend to know a “fixed point called ‘the truth.’ ” Indeed, for modern science truth is nothing but “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all chose who investigate.” In Lippmann’s mind even the great philosophies of life that were based on science, such as positivism, had proved to be perilously time-bound—“nothing but provisional dramatizations.” In this light norms and values are only “preferences,” lacking a “sure foundation.” Lippmann urged his readers to recognize, without equivocation, chat in the end they must find the “tests of righteousness wholly within human experience.”5

Undoubtedly there were many differences between Machen and Lippmann, but the critical difference, the difference chat lay at the root of all the others, was that Machen, unlike Lippmann, doubted the power of history to condition human understanding. Machen was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Johns Hopkins; Lippmann a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard. That men of comparable intelligence and training could differ on matters of taste or political allegiance is hardly surprising; that they could differ so fundamentally in world view gives pause. How did these nearly opposite ways of seeing reality come about?6

II

In a general sense Machen’s views about the relation between history and knowledge were rooted in the classical foundationalism of Greek philosophy, but the more proximate origins of his outlook can be traced to the apologetic writings of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Christian rationalists such as John Locke and Joseph Butler. A. C. McGiffert once called this cluster of notions “supernatural rationalism,” and though the label is clumsy, it is descriptively useful.7 Like contemporary deists, supernatural rationalists were confident that careful observation of history and nature can lead to reliable knowledge of God’s existence and attributes. Like pietists (and unlike deists), however, supernatural rationalists also believed that this natural knowledge of God is inadequate. For some, the special revelation given in Scripture was deemed to be effectively although not absolutely necessary for salvation. In the pink-cheeked words of John Wise of Ipswich, “Revelation is Nature’s law in a fairer and brighter Edition.” Others were less sanguine about human abilities. Honest analysis of the self, they held, exposes the limitations of reason and thus the need for special revelation given in Scripture. This does not mean that the content of Scripture is contrary to reason, but that it is above or beyond reason’s ordinary range of discernment. But for all supernatural rationalists the governing assumption was that the human mind is able to perceive the divine truth as it is disclosed in history and nature as well as in Scripture.8

Particularly important in the present context is the epistemology of supernatural rationalism. Men such as Locke and Butler were certain that knowledge of divine matters, like knowledge of all matters, is derived from sensation and reflection upon sensation. In their minds this meant that Christianity stood or fell with the persuasiveness of the sensible evidence. Two arguments were common. First, Christ fulfilled prophecies and performed miracles that were seen and heard by numerous observers. Second, there is no reason to doubt the probity of the men and women who witnessed and attested to these events. Especially noteworthy here is the ahistorical nature of the assumptions underlying this outlook. To begin with, these supernatural rationalists thought that the formal and material functions of reason can be neatly separated. Though they did not put it that way, they believed that reason could prescribe the (formal) credentials but not the (material) content of authentic revelation. In the words of one adherent, reason is “a sentinel at the entrance of the human mind, to determine what is true and what is false, what is to be admitted and what is to be kept out.” Underlying this notion was another assumption, buried so deep it might be better described as a presupposition. Supernatural rationalists assumed that Christian truth can be established with essentially a priori methods. Reason alone, shorn of contextual, developmental, or interpretive considerations, can determine the issue once and for all.9

In the later years of the eighteenth century the epistemic scaffolding of supernatural rationalism was increasingly buttressed by the rise of Scottish commonsense realism. The chief architect of this tradition was Thomas Reid (1710-1796), a Moderate Presbyterian clergyman who taught philosophy at Aberdeen and later at Glasgow. Reid was troubled by the problem of the reliability of our knowledge of the external world. The problem was ancient, but it had been raised anew in the 1690s by John Locke, who had argued that sensory impressions imprint ideas on the mind, and these ideas are the source of all knowledge. But if this is the case, David Hume responded, how can we be certain that any element of reality that is not directly and sensibly experienced, such as causality or a substantial self, truly exists? Indeed, how can we be certain that any idea truly corresponds to the external world? To Reid, the flaw in this whole line of thinking was the assumption that sensations create ideas that then serve as mirrors of reality. To the contrary, said Reid, rigorous examination of consciousness reveals the continuous and unmediated presence of the external world, not a layer of ideas somehow sandwiched between consciousness and the external world. This is to say that ideas are mental acts, not mental objects, and these mental acts are direct perceptions (or memories of direct perceptions) of the environment.10

Reid’s conviction that perception is trustworthy was based on the belief that consciousness embraces an array of forms that correspond to the intelligible forms of social and physical reality. He called them “first principles” or “direct intuitions.” In his estimation, the first principles that inform consciousness include axioms of logic and mathematics and numerous assumptions such as the belief that I am the same person today that I was yesterday, that clear and distinct memories are reliable, that right is different from wrong, and that perception is perception of the real world. Thus Archibald Alexander, one of Reid’s closest followers and probably the most influential teacher of theology in antebellum America, told the first class of students at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812 that there are scores of “self-evident truths,” which, “from the constitution of our nature, we are under the necessity of believing as soon as they are presented to the mind”—truths “which immediately on being proposed are perceived to be true without any process of reasoning in the case.” The pertinent point here is that first principles cannot be proved true. If they could, they would be derivative. Nor can they be disproved, for they are employed in all reasoning, and to refute them would require using them. First principles are, in short, prerational intuitions embedded in the very structure of consciousness. Neither innate nor learned, they are the forms that organize thought and make experience meaningful. They are the common sense of mankind, the arsenal of judgments everyone (including philosophers and other fools) presupposes in the daily routines of life.11

Taken together, then, supernatural rationalism and Scottish realism provided an epistemology that seemed to promise rational and reliable knowledge of social and material reality, including the divine truths woven into the fabric of reality. More precisely, this British-Scottish tradition shaped orthodox rationalism in the United States in the nineteenth century in at least three ways. First, it nurtured the conviction that persons have certain knowledge of the moral and natural realms because there is a perfect fit between these realms and the perceiving mind. There is, said Francis Wayland in 1835, “a world without us and a world within us, which exactly correspond to each other.” By divine contrivance there is “light without, and the eye within; beauty without, and taste within; moral qualities without, and conscience [within].” Or as another writer phrased it in 1860, the perceiving mind is like a “clear mirror, which, when brought face to face with an external object . . . sees it just as it is.” Second, it bolstered the view that the truths that can be discerned internally (in consciousness and conscience), the truths that can be discerned externally (in history, society, and nature), and the truths that can be discerned in the specially revealed realm of the Bible are congruent. And the reason is plain: God is one, truth is one, and the perceptual mechanism for knowing truth in each of these realms is, ultimately, one. Another way of putting it is to say that the psychological, physical, and moral laws that govern, respectively, the objective facts of consciousness, nature, and Scripture are essentially alike. Finally, the British-Scottish influence strengthened the belief that the proper method for acquiring religious knowledge is identical to the proper method for acquiring scientific knowledge. In both cases the inquirer looks at the data, determines the facts, classifies them, then draws prudent generalizations.12

In this last respect the popularity of Francis Bacon and the “Baconian method” of pure inductive inquiry is difficult to overstate. At the outset of his 1872 Systematic Theology, Charles Hodge averred that “the Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches.” Since the acquisition of religious knowledge was believed to be a quantitative rather than qualitative problem, a taxonomic rather than creative endeavor, it is not surprising that these conservatives came to see themselves, as Dwight Bozeman has said, as “theological scientist[s] . . . patiently and inductively coaxing the chaotic raw materials of revelation into scientific order.”13

In short, orthodox rationalism embodied a distinctive epistemology and, more significantly, this epistemology afforded the priceless comforts of an ahistorical universe. Its partisans were certain that the timeless and universal continuities of human consciousness provide a kind of seer stone through which the equally timeless and universal verities of society and nature can be discerned. When they thought about special revelation, this meant, first of all, that the events recorded in Scripture happened in just the way that the writers of Scripture said they happened. More crucially, it meant that the meaning of those events is fixed. The Bible is to be understood, not interpreted. Conservatives were dismayed by the growing idea that the meaning of scriptural events is open to a variety of interpretations. Learned biblical scholars such as Moses Stuart tended to regard even normative constructions, such as the doctrine of original sin or the doctrine of the atonement, as “hard” facts similar to the “hard” facts that the natural scientist discovers in the material world. And when these conservatives thought about God’s general revelation in the social and natural order, the same assumptions again were operative. Everywhere they looked, social processes seemed to be governed by a single set of “fundamental laws.” Beneath the legal codes enjoined by the courts, beneath the prescriptions of custom, beneath the Constitution of the United States itself, was the bedrock of fundamental law whose authority was absolute and immutable. Looking back from the perspective of the 1940s, Ralph Henry Gabriel judged that throughout most of the nineteenth century this cluster of beliefs, which he called “cosmic constitutionalism,” formed the primary article of the American democratic faith. It gave Americans, said Gabriel, “that mental peace and that sense of security which comes to the man who feels that he has planted his feet upon the eternal rock.”14

At this point I should acknowledge that even in its most imposing mid-nineteenth-century form, the epistemology of orthodox rationalism was not wholly ahistorical. Some of the most eminent and seemingly procrustean represent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Augustus Hopkins Strong
• Preface to the 2018 Edition
• Preface to the 1985 Edition
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Epilogue
• Historicism: A Bibliographical Note
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index