Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing

The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England before the Civil War

Sara Paretsky

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226337883
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Crime writer Sara Paretsky is known the world over for her acclaimed series of mysteries starring Chicago private investigator V. I. Warshawski, now in its seventeenth installment. Paretsky's work has long been inflected with history—for her characters the past looms large in the present—and in her decades-long career, she has been recognized for transforming the role of women in contemporary crime fiction.
What's less well-known is that before Paretsky began her writing career, she earned a PhD in history from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on moral philosophy and religion in New England in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Now, for the first time, fans of Paretsky can read that earliest work, Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing.Paretsky here analyzes attempts by theologians at Andover Seminary, near Boston, to square and secure Calvinist religious beliefs with emerging knowledge from history and the sciences. She carefully shows how the open-minded scholasticism of these theologians paradoxically led to the weakening of their intellectual credibility as conventional religious belief structures became discredited, and how this failure then incited reactionary forces within Calvinism. That conflict between science and religion in the American past is of interest on its face, but it also sheds light on contemporary intellectual battles.Rounding out the book, leading religious scholar Amanda Porterfield provides an afterword discussing where Paretsky's work fits into the contemporary study of religion. And in a sobering—sometimes shocking—preface, Paretsky paints a picture of what it was like to be a female graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s. A treat for Paretsky's many fans, this book offers a glimpse of the development of the mind behind the mysteries.

Chapter I

The Background of the Christian Scholar

:: :: ::

But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they are sent?

— Romans 10:14

In his 1852 apology for the New England divinity, the Calvinist E. A. Park praised his theological forebears for the virtues, both practical and intellectual, which they brought to their work. “We might extol them as diligent readers,” Park said. The theologian Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803) studied twelve hours every day “for more than half a century,” while his contemporary Nathaniel Emmons “remained like a fixture in his parsonage study, and like his brethren read ‘the books which are books.’” Still another eighteenth-century Calvinist, Dr. West, “sat near his library so long, that his feet wore away the wood-work in one part of his room, and left this enduring memorial of his sedentary habit.”1

These men followed a Congregational impulse going back to the time of Elizabeth I, the desire for a learned ministry. Hopkins, Emmons, and West all attended college. West, in particular, was an outstanding classical scholar.2 Nathaniel Emmons had an “ardent thirst for knowledge” and so “gained his father’s consent that he should commense a course of classical study.”3

Adept as they were in classical literature, it was not as important to these Christians as their souls’ salvation. For Sprague and other historians, a biography always centered on its subject’s sense of a saving conversion. Hopkins, in his autobiographical sketch, devoted considerable attention to his own religious awakening.4 Since every other decision of his adult life, including his career as a minister, related directly or indirectly to his conversion, it is not surprising that he devoted almost a fifth of his autobiography to it. The rest of the essay concerned problems relating to his career. Nowhere did he mention the classical scholarship in which he was so competent. He did not consider it important, except as a tool in understanding the Bible.

Hopkins’ System of Doctrines, the theological system he published near the end of his life, made heavy demands on its readers’ intelligence, but it was not an abstract exercise. The New England theologians were practical. They wanted to bring men to a sense of sin and show them the means of grace. Hopkins’ views on regeneration, which differed from older New England Calvinist thought, evolved during several decades of practical experience in revivals and pamphlet wars.5 He first published his ideas on the causes of sin in a controversy with Jonathan Mayhew.6

Hopkins and his contemporaries unified literature and theology by subordinating one to the other. Well versed in philosophy, particularly in the work of Locke, they incorporated his ideas into their theological thought. They did not produce separate literary or philosophical treatises. The assumption that other areas of knowledge could be integrated into theology remained with Hopkins’ heirs when they founded Andover in 1808.

Hopkins developed a following among a large group of Massachusetts clergy. They continued to refine his ideas, and to quarrel with the Old Calvinists. However, around 1805, the two groups began discussing uniting in founding a theological seminary. The Liberals’ take-over of Harvard posed a serious enough threat to Orthodox Calvinism that the two parties thought it time to settle their differences and join against the University’s influence. In addition, they found the existing structures for ministerial education inadequate and hoped to improve them.

Jedidiah Morse, a Trinitarian Calvinist in Charlestown, and a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, first considered the need for a separate institution. Hopkinsians and Old Calvinists ought to unite against the dangers emanating from Cambridge, he urged in his journal The Panoplist. A letter to him from Yale president Timothy Dwight in July, 1805, shared Morse’s fear of the waxing Liberal influence at Harvard. Dwight wrote his approval of Morse’s proposed institution, voicing his concern over the continued separation of the two parties in the controversy with the Liberals. The Harvard presidency stood vacant. Dwight feared that that position, too, would be filled by a Liberal, adding that “the election of Mr. Ware has occasioned very serious sensations” in Connecticut.7

Henry Ware’s election to the Hollis Chair of Divinity in 1805 had occasioned considerable sensation in Boston, too. As a Liberal Congregationalist, Ware denied that “Jesus Christ is God, equal to the Father.” Since the Hollis Professor’s duties included instructing aspirants to the ministry in a fifth year of study (after they completed the regular college course), Ware’s election was a serious blow to the Trinitarians.

The following year, as Dwight had feared, another Liberal was named president. Samuel Webber’s election to that office particularly galled Eliphalet Pearson, who had been acting president and not unnaturally hoped for the permanent position. Pearson, the Hancock Professor of Hebrew, was a Trinitarian Calvinist from the town of Andover some thirty miles north of Boston. He had been principal of Phillips Academy there until coming to Harvard. When he resigned his chair to protest Webber’s election, Andover voted to show their support for him by giving him a house.8

Convinced that “the interests of evangelical religion, so perilled [sic] at the University, called for some new and more vigorous efforts for their defence,”9 Pearson supported Morse’s seminary scheme. Pearson persuaded the wealthy Samuel Abbot of Andover to draw up a will leaving the bulk of his estate to Phillips Academy to establish a chair in theology. Some people thought Pearson unscrupulous in his efforts to get money for the seminary;10 others said that the whole seminary scheme was designed “to provide for the ex-Professor.”11

Pearson and Morse were Old Calvinists. At the same time that they were trying to establish a chair of Christian Theology at Phillips, the Hopkinsians were planning a seminary at Newbury Port, Massachusetts, about a day’s ride from Andover. One of their leaders, Dr. Samuel Spring, hoped to preserve the special doctrines of the Calvinist minority by establishing a school whose graduates would preach them. He persuaded three of his wealthy parishioners to endow such an institution. Leonard Woods (1774–1852), pastor of the Newbury Port Church, agreed to fill the chair of Christian theology.

Spring’s motives were only partly doctrinaire: he also sought a better way to teach young men preparing for the ministry. In the eighteenth century, ministerial aspirants had attached themselves to some divine whom they admired. He would form a small school whose members met several times a week for discussion. Leonard Woods’ training with Charles Backus followed this pattern.

Backus met with students once a week on Wednesday night, when he questioned them on the meaning of a previously assigned passage in Scripture. One evening, for example, the topic was St. John’s assertion that “God is love.” “Mr. Church,” Backus asked, “how is it consistent with this love, that God should make any miserable?” The student answered that “the good of the whole intelligent creation requires that the Sin should be punished.” Other questions followed, on the most perfect example of this love (in Jesus Christ), the nature of the atonement, and so on. In this catechetical fashion, students learned the details of the New England theology. They had a similar session on Sunday evening; once a week Backus lectured to them. This was the extent of their formal training. Everything else they learned through private reading.12

The number of men holding such schools was decreasing by the end of the eighteenth century. Spring himself had conducted one, but no longer had the energy to do so. He sought a more reliable vehicle for theological instruction than the part-time attention of a busy parish minister.13

Interest in founding a seminary coincided with an intense concern among pious Christians for the cause of missions. When Spring tried to get money from the wealthy Newbury Port merchant William Norris, Norris told him that his money was going to missions. Woods pointed out that training ministers of the Gospel would be the best possible gift to the cause of missions, and Norris promptly pledged $10,000 to the seminary.14 Abbot left his money to Phillips because he desired “the defense and promotion of the Christian Religion, by increasing the number of learned and able Defenders of the truth of the Gospel of Christ.”15 In later years he was fond of pointing at the seminary he had helped build, saying, “I hope it will be the means of saving millions of souls.”16

Morse found out that the Hopkinsians were planning a seminary through Leonard Woods, who edited his evangelical journal, The Panoplist. Morse immediately saw the opportunity for the joint Old Calvinist-Hopkinsian school he desired. Through Woods, who was Spring’s protégé (Woods edited another periodical, The Massachusetts Home Missionary Journal, for the Hopkinsian), he began urging the latter to unite with the Old Calvinists at Andover. The Newbury Port group were afraid, as Spring said, “of being swallowed up and making a grave for Hopkinsianism by union.”17 The Hopkinsian raised every conceivable objection to union, including legal questions which Morse had to clear up in the Massachusetts General Assembly. After almost two years of negotiations, Spring finally signed a set of “Principles of Union” with Pearson, on the condition that Woods be the first professor of Christian theology.

The “Principles of Union” announced that the two groups would prepare a creed for the seminary to which its faculty had to swear annually.18 Faculty and students could belong either to Presbyterian or Congregational churches, but they had to affirm the teachings of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. In addition, the Hopkinsians would construct an associate creed for the professors they appointed. The founders hoped that requiring an annual avowal of these doctrines would preserve the school from the kind of change that had occurred at Harvard. Abbot, in fact, made his bequest contingent on the chairholder’s espousal of all the points in the Shorter Catechism.19

The divergent types creating Andover shared one object: the defense and promotion of Orthodox Congregationalism. One might fancifully picture the seminary as a fortress for defending orthodoxy. The faculty made up the first line of fortifications, guarding the New England divinity through the time-honored means of sermons and pamphlets. At the same time, they engaged in a new activity: the mass training of young men to preach the Gospel in foreign lands and the western United States.

The Seminary’s commitment to evangelism can be seen in the careers of its graduates. Of the 981 men graduated between 1811 and 1850, 255, or 23 percent, spent some part of their careers in home or foreign mission work. They passed the rest of their working lives in settled pastorates in the United States. Sixty-seven, or 7 percent, devoted their entire lives to foreign missions (two were shot in Sumatra) and 53 to home missions. In all, 38 percent of these men spent all or part of their careers in missions. Of the remaining, 438, or 44 percent, worked only as parish ministers; 95 served as both ministers and teachers; 60 taught either in academies or colleges; and 78 served as agents for various evangelical societies.20

These figures argue powerfully that training ministers and missionaries, not educating scholars, was the seminary’s primary goal. Indeed, only a handful of intellectuals of any note came out of Andover. Christian scholars emerged among the faculty as a side effect of trying to equip their students with the best skills available for confronting heathenism, paganism, Romanism, or heresies bred closer to home.

The trustees did not focus on skill in language and literature in choosing their faculty. Because they were to serve the cause of God in so many different ways—teaching, preaching, studying, conducting polemical debates—the trustees sought ministers of unimpeachable orthodoxy and proven energy to teach at their seminary. The faculty were educated as well as possible in the New England colleges of the 1790s, but they were not scholars. Indeed, as Eliphalet Pearson’s short career at Andover demonstrates, the seminary had no use for scholars in its early days.

Pearson had been a Hebraist at Harvard for twenty years before coming to Andover. In the Annals of the American Pulpit, he is remembered as a perfectionist in language study who was dissatisfied with less than that high standard in his students.21 This attitude stood him in poor stead at Andover. Woods said of him that “his manner of teaching and his idea of government and social intercourse were not agreeable to pious young men” preparing to preach.22 The seminarians, enthusiastic in their call to the ministry, valued their devotional exercises and spent a lot of time at them. The free style of these gatherings embarrassed Pearson. He found the students more eager for their prayers than for the study of sacred literature.23 A high degree of mutual dissatisfaction resulted in Pearson’s resigning his office at the end of a year. Although he remained president of the Board of Trustees until his death in 1826, he did not take much interest in seminary affairs or in the gospel ministry. He devoted the rest of his life to historical researches.

Pearson was a scholar, but not a Christian one. His concern with the ultimate questions of religion was not tied to the studies he prosecuted; his tenure at the seminary, where these questions held the central place, was an unhappy one. Other early members of the faculty were Christians, but not Christian scholars.

Among the three initial chairholders when the seminary opened, only Pearson had any pretence to scholarship. Neither Leonard Woods, Abbot Professor of Christian Theology, nor Edward Griffin, the Bartlett Professor of Sacred Rhetoric, studied literature for its sake alone. Nor did the seminary want men who did.

The trustees expected the professor of sacred rhetoric to be a model of oratorical ability. As a teacher he was to present the principles of Christianity “homiletically and rhetorically,” teaching young men to prepare and deliver sermons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index