A passion for progress
Though defenders of conservative evangelicalism, neo-orthodoxy and radical theology agree on very little, all would gladly dance on the grave of 19th-century liberal Protestantism. Nineteenth-century liberalism conjures up images of earnest progressive clergy ministering to elite congregations, all trying to be thoroughly up to date while missing the real thrust of their era. In this, the first volume of a projected three-volume, comprehensive history of American theological liberalism, Gary Dorrien sets out to present these 19th-century generations anew, showing both their strengths and weaknesses. Combining theological analysis with historical and biographical detail, Dorrien, professor of theology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, strives to make the figures and ideas of this era arresting to modern readers.
The liberal theological impulse was (and is) for Dorrien a middle way. It was an attempt to establish a real Christianity without relying on external authorities--a Christianity that could avoid (to use language favored by some Victorians) both orthodoxy and "infidelism." The story is well known to students of American religious history, having been surveyed most notably by William Hutchison in The Modernist Impulse and American Protestantism (still the classic work). But Dorrien stresses two factors not emphasized by earlier writers: that American theological liberalism is native, not something imported from Europe, and that it is deeply rooted in the pulpit.
The main contour of his narrative is not radically different from the contour of earlier histories. He begins with the Unitarians and William Ellery Channing, and then moves to the Transcendentalists and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. Next come Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, the Andover School, and the end of the century academics like Charles A. Briggs and Borden P. Bowne. But Dorrien has contextualized the theology far more than earlier students have. Thus we see Parker as an abolitionist as well as a radical Unitarian, Beecher in scandal as well as in the pulpit, and Bushnell as a traditional (and for Dorrien by no means sympathetic) social thinker as well as a theologian.
