When theology ruled
Few pastors would dare to announce a sermon series on "theology" these days, since few of their parishioners would tolerate such an intellectual subject. However, E. Brooks Holifield challenges us to examine the central role played by Christian theological ideas in our nation's early religious history. Holifield, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Church History at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, delineates with precision and remarkable insight the development of Christian theology in America from the time of settlement until the Civil War. He ranges across traditions, denominations and intellectual movements and discusses in depth the theological contributions of the leading religious thinkers of the time.
Though he's not the first scholar to engage this task, Holifield takes the enterprise to new heights. His book will become a standard reference work for students in seminaries and religious studies programs, as well as for religious professionals. Christian laypeople who seek insight into their own denominations and traditions also will find the book invaluable.
Holifield's central insight involves his identification of "evidential Christianity," a preoccupation with the reasonableness of Christianity that most early-American theologians shared. His account of evidential Christianity begins with a discussion of the ways in which the Calvinist clergy in early New England balanced human reason and biblical revelation. And he situates the Calvinist origins of American theology within the broader context of the Atlantic world. Those early New England Calvinists, extending from Thomas Hooker and John Cotton in the 1630s to Jonathan Edwards and Jonathan Mayhew more than a century later, initially brought their theological ideas from Europe, and they remained in conversation with European philosophers and Christian theologians.
