Divided between Heart and Mind: the Critical Period for Protestant Thought in America

Abstract

In 1854, Philip Schaff, professor of church history at Mercersburg Theological Seminary and minister of the German Reformed Church, reported to his denomination on the state of Christianity in America. Although the American Church had many shortcomings, according to Schaff the United States was ‘by far the most religious and Christian country in the world’. Many Protestant leaders, however, took a dimmer view of Christianity's prospects. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a nagging sense prevailed that traditional theology was no longer capable of integrating religion and culture, or piety and intelligence. Bela Bates Edwards, a conservative New England divine, complained of the prevalent opinion ‘that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect’. Edwards was not merely lamenting the unpopularity of Calvinism. A Unitarian writer also noted a burgeoning ‘clerical skepticism’. Intelligent and well-trained men who wished to defend and preach the Gospel, he wrote, ‘find themselves struggling within the fetters of a creed by which they have pledged themselves’. An 1853 Memorial to the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church summed up the doubts of Protestant clergymen when it asked whether the Church's traditional theology and ministry were ‘competent to the work of preaching and dispensing the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men, and so adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age’.