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6. AMERICA COMES OF AGE

AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY RESPONDS

CONTENTS

Christianity again undergoing deep debate

Charles Briggs and Biblical "higher criticism"

The Social Gospel

Spiritual Universalism

The Azusa Street Revival and the AG Church

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 198-202.
CHRISTIANITY AGAIN UNDERGOING DEEP DEBATE

At the time, "Christianity" was so deeply embedded in the idea of America that the ideological developments going on in Europe seemed to have little impact outside of some smaller intellectual circles in America.  Even Liberals like Dewey did not at first see themselves as offending Christianity just because he was not working within a deeply Christian worldview.  He was simply doing science the way others conducted science in their chemistry or biological labs.  What he was doing had nothing to do one way or the other (not at that time however) with Christianity.  However, with time, (by the time of the publication of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto) Dewey would find himself taking on a more distinctly anti-Christian role.  America needed deliverance from not just tradition, "Christian" as such tradition claimed to be, but from the superstition that accompanied it.

But for the time being, for the vast majority of Americans, still sitting regularly in the pews of the American churches, Christian tradition had not yet been shaken by this "higher" intellectual inquiry going on in the rarified atmosphere of America's intellectual circles.

"Science" or "religion"?  And yet God himself as "providence" or provider of American blessings was losing much of his place in American hearts.  The social dynamic driving the country was seemingly handled quite nicely by the progress that science and technology were achieving.  And science worked mechanically, no miracles needed.  And judging from the considerable material progress America was experiencing at the time, science was more than adequate as the true sustainer of society and its progress.

At the same time, the bedrock of America's Protestant Christianity – Biblical Scripture as the "Word of God" – had recently come into deep debate ... especially in the higher social circles of science and theology. This debate involved an argument between religious "modernism," supporting the role of science and technology, and religious "traditionalism," with its support of divine miracles that had no known scientific basis for their occurrence.  Which of these contending positions was a thinking person supposed to support:  science (materialism) or religion (mysticism), especially as the Biblical writings themselves raised those very questions?

Christianity attempts a reply.  Princeton Seminary had long taken the position under the dominating influence of Charles Hodge (1850s through most of the 1870s) to be unbending in the attitude that every word of Scripture was God-breathed and thus not to be questioned or disputed.  In short, Hodge was defending very strongly the principle of the "inerrancy of Biblical Scripture."  But he would find his position increasingly challenged as the 1800s moved towards its close.

Meanwhile, another approach to this issue was that of those who simply chose to ignore the debate, and focus on the issue at hand:  saving souls.  One such individual was Crawford H. Toy, a professor at the Southern Baptist Seminary, who won hearts by simply focusing on the spirit of love that stood at the heart of Christianity – rather than theological doctrine.  Unfortunately, even that proved to be too much of a compromise for the otherwise creedless Baptists, whose Convention in 1879 forced him to resign his position at the seminary because he was not taking a sufficiently pro-inerrancy stand.

More successful in this middling approach was Henry Ward Beecher, son of the conservative Presbyterian preacher Lyman Beecher and brother of fellow Abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom's Cabin).  As a popular pastor and circuit preacher, Beecher sidestepped the controversial intellectual issues of evolution and Biblical reliability, even stating at one point that he saw no problem with the theory of evolution – as long as it understood God to be at the heart of the process.  He preached a very upbeat message of love and a willing accommodation to the changing industrial culture developed around the Christian community.  And he proved to be quite successful in developing a stable middle-class message in the face of Darwinism's intellectual challenge, all the way up until his death in 1887.

Another individual to take something of a middling approach to the issue of traditional theological correctness and the rising new cultural norm of industrial/scientific Rationalism was Dwight L. Moody, circuit preacher and simple but straightforward evangelist.  Moody preached to crowds of mostly middle-class Americans, who were simply trying to make sense of the social changes underway in their once-familiar America.  Moody was far from being an intellectual Progressivist with a moral program designed to make the world a better place.  Nor did he have any strong views on the burning issues of the Christian seminaries, such as evolution or Biblical inerrancy.  He was a classic premillennial who simply looked to Jesus's second coming to clean up the mess that human sin had made of creation.  And that approach to life's challenges at the end of the 1800s made sense to thousands of people who flocked to hear what he had to say at his various urban rallies held around the country.

CHARLES BRIGGS AND BIBLICAL "HIGHER CRITICISM"

But towards the end of the century, a thunderstorm broke over Union Theological Seminary's Hebrew scholar Charles Briggs' clear affirmation that text-criticism or literary analysis amply proved among other things that Moses did not actually write the first five books of Scripture but that these writings were the result of the much later collection of at least four different narrative traditions, and  that Isaiah did not write the entire work given under his name but that later disciples of the Isaiah school had written the second half of the work.

Although for any who might have understood that the Jewish Scriptures were community narrative (not science), such a revelation should have come as no surprise.  Biblical narrative was about finding the path to Truth through divine inspiration, and was not assembled anciently by those with a modern scientific worldview.  But Briggs went further, even claiming that the Old Testament was morally inferior to the moral development of modern times.

This so enraged the Presbyterian denomination that in 1893 it not only excommunicated him[1] but tried to block Briggs' professorial advancement at Union Seminary in New York City.  But the seminary refused to dismiss Briggs, and instead the seminary withdrew from the Presbyterian denomination (both Briggs and the seminary joined the more "modernist" Episcopalian denomination).

But Brigg's excommunication hardly caused the controversy to go away. It merely deepened the controversy, as biblical perfection or "infallibility" became one of the essential doctrines, one of the "fundamentals of faith," proclaimed by a growing group of Christian traditionalists – who eventually took or were assigned the name "Fundamentalists" ... derived from the publication, The Fundamentals, presenting essays over the period of 1910-1915, written by some 65 theologians of various denominations ... essays in support of the idea of the infallible authority of Scripture.

[1]Commentators have noted that part of his difficulty with the denomination occurred in part also because of Briggs’ abrasive manner when challenged.

THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

But the modernizers or religious "Liberals" were hardly cowed by the Fundamentalists.  They had other things to do than argue over the points of Scripture and its infallibility.  They even backed away from the idea that Christianity was essentially about saving souls from going to hell because they had not yet been saved.  Rather, they were advocates of a "Social Gospel" – which conformed nicely to the Progressivist spirit of the times.  For instance, Congregationalist pastor Washington Gladden, Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, and economist Richard Ely were all active in promoting the idea that Christianity after all was about social and economic justice, helping the poor the way Jesus looked to the needs of the poor.

But once again, looking to material salvation rather than spiritual salvation hardly needed the personal support of God, the guidance of the Biblical word of God, or any kind of Christian spiritual conversion in order to move their program forward.  A purely Secular approach to social and economic justice would work just as well.

SPIRITUAL UNIVERSALISM

But once again, Humanist Rationalism or Secularism hardly met the deeper urges of people to find spiritual connection with the world around them.  But some in the Modernist camp simply came up with the attitude that any kind of spirituality would do just fine, something like the Transcendentalists of the early-mid 1800s. Witchcraft was not one of the ideas put forward (at that time).  But the spiritual offerings of other religions were – especially the more exotic kinds coming out of the Far East.

Indeed, a number of intellectuals even proposed simply to create some kind of universal religion, combining the moral features of Christianity, Buddhism, etc. Theosophy was just such an example – cultivated outside America by such Humanists as the Russian occultist and author Helena Blavatsky, her British disciple Annie Besant, and the Austrian educator Rudolf Steiner – that was taken up in America by intellectuals seeking to combine science and the mysticism of the world's great religions, as a form of personal development (also very popular later in the 20th century among very self-focused American hippies!).  Thus science could continue to pursue fact and Progressive Liberals could pursue through private faith some kind of universal moral code, even some kind of personal mysticism.   And so a sort of spiritual "universalism" came into play in certain social circles, especially among the more modern and thus more enlightened of the Westerners (including Americans, though not in the numbers as was the case for Europe).

It is important to note at this point that Islam was not as interesting to such hungry hearts, in part because it was even more fundamentalist in character, and did not conform well to the goal of "personal freedom" sought by Western Liberals.  Islam is as hungry for submission to authority as Western modernism is hungry for freedom from just such authority!

THE AZUSA STREET REVIVAL AND THE AG CHURCH

Then into this growing world of enlightened Humanism another Christian revival burst forth – not quite on the order of the two earlier Great Awakenings, but significant nonetheless.  Something very strange broke out in Los Angeles in 1906 (something quite similar to what was going on at the same time in Wales in Britain) at a meeting house on Azusa Street.

It started when strange physical healings and "speaking in tongues" broke out at a home – when a Black holiness preacher and guest speaker William J. Seymour was kicked out of church after bringing his Pentecostal message there,  and was thus forced to move his ministry to this home.  The event soon drew crowds to witness and then participate in this strange behavior, until it became literally an on-going twenty-four-hour-a-day phenomenon.  When the crowds collapsed the porch to the house, the revival moved its operations to a Black Apostolic Faith Mission building on Azusa Street, making it quite inter-racial in nature as well as inter-ethnic (Hispanics also attending), even bringing women forward to take leading roles in the revival.  Hundreds, then over a thousand individuals would soon be attending the meetings.  And thus was formed the Azusa Street Revival.

Healings, speaking in tongues, and almost non-stop preaching took place there, giving rise to the designation of this growing event as "Pentecostalism" because it so resembled the events on that ancient day when a similar spirit formed the foundations of the first Christian community.  Individuals of all social backgrounds were touched by a special spiritual power or charisma (thus also becoming considered to be "charismatics") that seemed to drive this whole development.

Eventually the Azusa Street Revival would burn itself out – but not before birthing the Assemblies of God church in 1914, a Pentecostal/ charismatic denomination that would continue to grow through the 20th century, its growth continuing even to today, to the point where the denomination has around 370 thousand congregations with over seventy million members worldwide.



Go on to the next section:  America Enters the World Stage

  Miles H. Hodges