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MAJOR THEOLOGICAL ISSUES BEFORE THE GREAT WAR

 

The First World War closed the era of classical Liberal theology. How it did this we will see, but first it is important to trace the development of the cardinal ideas and assumptions of Liberal theology, for the major theological issues of the nineteenth century continued to influence, even to define, theological debate even after the Great War had thrown everything up for grabs. I believe the great issues on the eve of World War I were five: epistemology, evolution, biblical criticism, the historical Jesus, and the Social Gospel. Let us see what they mean and how they emerged.

 

Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone

Much of the shape of nineteenth century Liberal theology was already implied in the "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy brought about by the Eighteenth Century German thinker Immanuel Kant. Kant's thinking, as it were, contained the DNA from which the later movement would spring. First we must say just a bit about the philosophical deadlock that existed in Kant's day. European philosophy was a war-torn field in which struggled the forces of Rationalism and Empiricism. Rationalists including Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Benedict Spinoza had composed massive treatises demonstrating that the unaided human mind could perceive the nature of ultimate reality, even proving God’s existence by the sheer force of logic. (Most used some form of the famous and mind-twisting Ontological Argument of Saint Anselm.) These men were mathematicians and believed that the same purely deductive approach could enable them to spin out the map of reality from inside their heads.

Empiricists including Bishop Berkeley, John Locke, and David Hume rejected Rationalism, pointing to the fact that none of the Rationalists' supposedly certain schemas agreed with one another! How can we trust any of them, much less the allegedly infallible process that created them? Instead, these Empiricists asserted, truth may be known, if at all, only through sense perception. Hume, the "great skeptic" and the most ruthlessly consistent of the Empiricists, pointed out that empirical observation could yield very meagre results. It could not, for instance, guarantee the existence of God, a physical world, an observing self, or even cause-and-effect! Strictly speaking, we cannot perceive any of these things, so we have no right to say we know they exist. We may, indeed we must, live on the assumption that most of these are real, but we cannot have theoretical or logical certainty.

Kant, raised as a Pietist, had come under the influence of Leibniz’s version of Rationalism, but when he read Hume, he said it "woke me from my dogmatic slumber." Kant accepted the Empiricists’ damning criticisms of Rationalism yet could not go the whole way with Hume to epistemological skepticism. Kant could not glibly discount the certainty we cannot help feeling about certain things we cannot strictly perceive. Why, for instance, do we trust implicitly in the operation of cause-and-effect? Is it simply habit, as Hume claimed: we are used to seeing things happen in a certain sequence (Whenever I drop the ball, it has always fallen to the floor)?

Kant reasoned that our certainty arises from the perceptual mechanism of the mind. True, as Hume claimed, we cannot know if the world actually operates according to the apparent law of causation; but since our minds are constructed in such a way that all sense data will be perceived as in a causal sequence, we are certain that our dropping the ball will "cause" it to fall.

The long and short of this is that Kant concluded that pure, unaided reason cannot tell us about realities beyond the senses, since our "knowledge" is always and by nature the product of reason processing sense data. And reason simply cannot contact realities beyond the senses. To underscore this point, Kant undertook to demonstrate the fallacy, even the logical absurdity, of all the famous arguments and “proofs” for God’s existence. All of them run aground as they must since they are attempts to use reason without its proper data. Thus Kant had dealt the death blow, or so it seemed to many at the time, to traditional "natural theology,” the speculative construction of systems of divine knowledge.

So "pure reason" could not tell us there is a God. Yet Kant thought what he called "practical reason" could. We cannot actually prove God, but we can make his existence likely and plausible, even urgently attractive of belief. Kant used a moral argument for God. He inferred (not proved) God’s existence from human moral awareness. Within us lies an awareness of the moral law. If this awareness is not to be judged illusory, we must infer that a divine creator has placed it within us, will provide eternal life for our continued sanctification, and will judge our moral efforts. Now all this may be an illusion, but such a conclusion is unprovable and is utterly repugnant, so we are justified in believing in God, moral law, judgment and afterlife. But no more.

Kant argued that the goal of religion thus established is to foster our moral rebirth and growth, and that all doctrines, miracle-stories, dogmas, and myths are merely symbolic pointers and aids to that end. Real religion does not depend on scriptural authority, theological doctrines, or miraculous proofs, nor has the rational religious person any valid ground for believing in such things. Jesus, for example, is to be emulated as he managed perfectly to live in accordance with the moral law, but he is not literally the incarnate savior traditional dogma made him.

 

Evolution and the Higher Criticism

While dissenting from Kant's exclusively moral reconstruction of the faith, many traditional Christians said a hearty Amen to Kant's systematic demolition of speculative, rationalistic theology. Many had always been fideists and biblicists. That is, celebrating the bankruptcy and impotence of human reasoning, many Christians claimed that our knowledge of God comes from God's side, not ours; he has revealed himself and various divine truths in the Bible. Of course human reason cannot discover realities beyond the senses; that is precisely why God took it upon himself to penetrate the barrier from the far side, giving us the verbally inspired and inerrant scripture. How does one know about God? Through faith in the Bible.

Such believers might feel they could ignore Kant, but soon they found themselves under more dangerous attack. What if scripture itself could not be trusted to contain infallible knowledge? This time Charles Darwin led the attack, or so his religious detractors saw it. The notion that all present life forms had gradually developed from one or a few original forms was hardly a new one; it had been suggested as far back as the Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander and later by Saint Augustine. But in a paper co-written with Alfred Russell Wallace, and later in The Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin had provided the understanding of the mechanism by which this evolution occurred: natural selection, the happy coincidence between genetic mutations and environmental conditions giving the mutant better chances of survival and thus a greater chance at genetically controlling the future of its species.

Almost immediately Christians perceived the great conflict between Darwin's account of origins and that presented in Genesis. The appearance of the various life-forms must have taken millions of years, not a few days. Their appearance was a gradual differentiation and separation of species, not a discrete creation of animals each "according to its kind.” The order of appearance suggested by fossils and phylogeny contradicted that in Genesis Chapter One. And worst of all, the first human must have fallen up from apedom, not down from Edenic innocence.

The evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection has grown greater and greater, but even in Darwin's own day it was virtually incontrovertible, and many theologians sought to adjust their doctrines to the new biological revolution. This was in itself a wrenching enough change for many obscurantists never to risk it. But even if one became a theistic evolutionist, the real impact of evolution was far greater than forcing a reinterpretation of a few verses of Genesis. Evolution forced the recognition that the Bible contained myth and legend, and if Genesis One contained myth, it was probably not alone.

Darwinism turned out to be only one of many sources for a new wave of radical biblical study called "Higher Criticism.” "Lower Criticism" was simply textual criticism, the tedious reconstruction of the original text of scripture by weeding out millenniums' worth of copyists' errors. But Higher Criticism was a wide-ranging reexamination of literary sources, historical accuracy, and claims to authorship. The Bible emerged from the process a different book. Archaeological discoveries in the Middle East disclosed, e.g., that Flood stories startlingly similar to that of Noah were common in the region, and some were older than the Genesis version. Other discoveries suggested that Joshua could not have destroyed Jericho or Ai and that Canaan was not conquered miraculously as scripture said. Comparative religion researches showed that virgin birth stories, ascensions, and other miracle stories were quite common in ancient legendry. Close literary analysis demonstrated that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, which was instead compiled in the fifth century B. C. from four distinct earlier documents interwoven and edited together. Jonah turned out to be a parable, Daniel a prophecy written after the fact, Isaiah written by two, three, or four different prophets, none of whom had predicted the life or death of Jesus Christ.

All such findings and theories were unsettling enough, but real panic set in when David Friedrich Strauss and others began to lay irreverent hands on the Gospels (Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined; Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, etc.). Could it be that even the life of Jesus had not been accurately reported? More of this presently. Suffice it to say that for those who honestly faced the results of the critical study of scripture, it was by no means clear that the biblical revelation offered much of an alternative to the theological agnosticism of Kant and his non-doctrinal religion of morality. A better alternative, it turned out, came from another quarter.

 

The Feeling of Absolute Dependence

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, like Kant, grew up in a Pietist home. He was a student of philosophy, theology, and biblical criticism, and all three were to playa role in his emerging reconstruction. Schleiermacher burst onto the scene in 1799 with a series of written apologias called On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. In this and future works, notably his magnum opus The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher sought both to rebut Kant's thinking and to apply it constructively.

Schleiermacher found himself in agreement with Kant that the essence of religion is not to provide a privileged kind of knowledge, i.e., infallible knowledge of God. Kant is right: the human mind is over its head in such waters. We can neither discover nor comprehend such knowledge (“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high. I cannot attain it,” Psalm 139:6). But Kant is wrong when he claims instead that the essence of religion is morality. No, says Schleiermacher, religion indeed involves both knowledge and morality, but its essence is something else which transcends both. That something else is piety, a special kind of intuitive feeling of the Infinite, that overarching Whole of which we are parts and on which we are absolutely dependent. Of course all finite creatures are absolutely dependent on this Infinite Whole, or God, but piety is to be aware of that dependence, to feel it with one’s whole being, or as Schleiermacher also put it, to be fully God-conscious.

We can be conscious of God and our dependence on God, but Schleiermacher was careful to point out that, as Kant says, human reason cannot discover abstract theoretical knowledge about God. Rather, the very personal, intuitive knowledge we may have of God arises from our religious experience, the consciousness of piety. We do not know God directly; we only infer things about God from our experience of God. In the final analysis our doctrines are really formulations of religious experience.

For example, when we speak of God as the creator we are not proposing some theoretical notion of how the world got here. Rather we are expressing our acute intuitive sense that we and all things depend at every moment on God for our being. Or when we speak of Christ as our savior, we have no business spinning out theories of how his shed blood purchased our salvation. All we can rightly mean is that when we read of Christ in the Gospels and hear him preached in church we find his perfect God-consciousness has been in some measure awakened in us. He, his example, functions as the catalyst or channel for a new piety to transform us. This is what we actually experience; this is all we have the right to say. It is clear that though Schleiermacher goes significantly beyond Kant's moralism to a genuine religious devotion, he does so in recognizably Kantian ways. Just as Kant claimed no direct knowledge of God but inferred God from human moral consciousness, so Schleiermacher infers God from the consciousness of piety and does not claim this is certain, theoretical knowledge. For Kant Jesus is an inspiring example of moral victory; even so, for Schleiermacher Jesus is the model of the perfectly pious person and as such “redeems” us by his enlivening example. Finally, just as Kant found miracle and dogma irrelevant to his religion of pure morality, Schleiermacher rejects as irrelevant any traditional doctrine that cannot be translated into experience, e.g., the devil, angels, a literal second coming of Christ.

One further word about miracles: Schleiermacher repudiated the traditional belief in miracles as astounding violations of natural law. He famously said, “To me, all is miracle.” The greatness and wisdom of God are far more evident­ in the well-oiled regularity of the universe than they would be in strange events interrupting the normal workings of nature. It does not speak well for God if he must intervene via paranormal events to make a “mid-course correction.” Could not the all-wise God have gotten it right the first time? Even Jesus formed no exception to this rule. Schleiermacher believed Jesus was sinless and perfectly God-conscious, but this is possible to all human beings. Jesus was fully human, perfectly human, not super-human! In Paul's terminology, Schleiermacher's Jesus is the second Adam, a perfect example of what all humans should be (and thanks to Jesus' influence) can be.

But what of the virgin birth and resurrection? The former Schleier­macher understood as a mythical symbol for Jesus' sinlessness, while the latter he explained away. Schleiermacher believed Jesus only passed out on the cross and survived crucifixion, dying naturally at some later point (see his The Life of Jesus).

Schleiermacher is rightly called the father of Liberal theology. His influence is present everywhere in Protestant Modernism before the Great War. Note that here we have a theology that welcomes the findings of science, philosophy, and biblical criticism, a theology not dependent on an infallible Bible or belief in miracles or a six-day creation. Yet it is really a theology of religious experience, not mere moralism like Kant's. Following Schleiermacher, Liberal theology was a theology of religious experience, not of abstract revealed information.

 

The Historical Jesus and the Social Gospel

In the next generation the banner of Liberal theology was carried proudly and ably by Albrecht Ritschl, who was heavily indebted to Schleiermacher and to Kant, uniting the emphases of both in a powerful new synthesis that captured the minds and hearts of pastors, theologians, social reformers, and biblical historians alike. Like both Kant and Schleiermacher, Ritschl was deeply suspicious of what he considered idle and abstract theological speculation. For instance, Schleiermacher remained noncommital on the question of the Trinity since he could not see how such a complex notion made much difference one way or the other to religious experience. But Ritschl simply dismissed the whole idea as a lot of theological thumb-twiddling. He had even less tolerance for abstract speculation, even more of a passion for the pragmatic, than Schleiermacher. We will concern ourselves with two aspects of Ritschl's desire to stay close to reality.

First, Ritschl addressed the question of theological epistemology (how we can know about God) in a fresh way. He was essentially at one with Schleiermacher in denying that the Christian has theoretical knowledge, objective information, about God. Ritschl admitted that Christian faith is less of a knowledge-claim than it is a value-judgment. He delighted in quoting Luther to the effect that we know Christ only through his benefits. Is not "worship," after all, simply a contraction of "worth-ship," an assessment of God, an ascribing to God the honor due his name? So again we meet with the Kant­-Schleiermacher admission that God is not knowable cognitively. But Ritschl felt that to infer or extrapolate our understandings of God from religious experience was too dangerously subjective. We might be making God in our own image. Where is there any control? In Jesus Christ, Ritschl answered. It is in the historical appearance of Jesus of Nazareth that Christians encounter God. So it must be in the historical study of Jesus that we find the proper controls for our religious experience. Nothing we cannot verify as part of the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth can be binding for Christian faith.

This means, for instance, that Christians need not believe in any heavenly existence of Christ before or after his earthly life. Even the resurrection and second coming are negligible since they are not open to verification as part of the historical events of Jesus' life. It is his teaching, example, and martyr­ death that matter.

Incidentally, following Schleiermacher, Ritschl repudiated the notion of an ongoing "personal relationship with Christ" because that would assume we have some non-historical, non-verifiable experience of Christ beyond his earthly life. If we do, then what is the point of his earthly life at all? How is it normative for us if today we have our own special hot-line to Christ, if "he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own"?

By far most Liberal Protestants agreed with Ritschl as to the absolutely central importance of finding the historical truth about Jesus behind the encrusted legends of the Gospels and dogmas of the creeds. New Testament scholars felt sure that if they could only peel away these layers, they could reveal for the first time Jesus as a human prophet and teacher with a vital message for modern humanity, as fresh today as it was in his own day before Christian dogma hid it from view.

One of Ritschl's disciples, Adolph Harnack, one of the greatest scholars both of the New Testament and of the history of theology, wrote what is perhaps the definitive and most typical Liberal study of the historical Jesus, What Is Christianity? (1899-1900). In it he sought to demonstrate that Jesus preached not about himself but about his loving Father. He did not preach the need for belief in dogmas or faith in his death as an atonement. He taught instead the Kingdom of God within the heart, the infinite value of the individual soul to God, and love as a righteousness higher than religious legalism. Jesus was central not as an object of faith but as the living embodiment of his message. His Messiahship was purely spiritual, his mission that of a teacher, his Sonship a special relationship with God in principle no different from that available to everyone else.

Harnack saw a wide chasm between the simple religion of Jesus and the later, complicated religion about Jesus created by Paul and others who sought to recreate Christianity in the mold of Greek philosophy. Though details might vary, this was the view of Jesus common to all Liberal Protestant theology. If the life, teaching, and personality of Jesus were central for faith, not his death and resurrection, then it was imperative to penetrate the Gospels to discover that life, teaching, and personality. The bare fact of his death and the dubious story of his resurrection had been enough for the old theology, built as it was on abstractions about the cross and the empty tomb. But it would not suffice for the new theology. Ritschl's second tent-peg of realism in theology was his Kantian insistence on the moral practicality, one might say the social utility, of religion. He felt religion was the sole factor separating humanity from animals and enabling us to live morally. Jesus’ mission, in fact, was largely aimed at founding a new moral community, the Kingdom of God (more or less equivalent to the church) in which people could work together for the "unification of the human race, through action prompted by universal love to our neighbor.”

Social reform, then, was a vital part of the Christian mission as Ritschl and his legions of followers saw it. Indeed, social reform might be said to have replaced evangelism. This is because Ritschl did not believe in "original sin," an inherited taint in human nature. Rather, he located sin in the environment into which we are born and which corrupts us. If Christians can reform that society, sin can be defeated. Here we have one of the chief sources of the Social Gospel movement, surely the most visible manifestation of Liberal Protestantism before World War I.

Actually an early wave of Christian social reform including abolitionism, feminism, prohibition, and the establishment of orphanages, hospitals, and colleges had begun in America before the Civil War as an outgrowth of the Holiness Revival (represented today by the Salvation Army, the Wesleyan, and the Nazarene Churches among others). Then, personal sanctification issued in a social crusade, based on the assumption that if God's Spirit could so radically renovate individuals, why not society as a whole?

Most of these earlier reformers and revivalists held what is called "Post-millennial" beliefs about the second coming of Christ, namely that Christ would not return to usher in the paradisical Millennium, but would return at its close, as its climax, after the power of the Holy Spirit working through Christians had transformed this world into a kingdom fit for Christ.

The Civil War seems largely to have dampened these hopes, and most American Christians adopted the more pessimistic doctrine of Pre-millennialism: the world would go from bad to worse until Christ returned to save it at the last minute, ushering in the Millennial Kingdom by himself. Until then, Christians resigned themselves to living in a sinful world, their mission being simply to rescue individual sinners from its wreckage before it was too late. "God has given me a lifeboat," said one evangelist, "and said, 'Moody, save all you can!’”

The Liberal Protestant Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries represented a kind of revival of Christian social reformism, only with a whole new theological rationale. Gone was the literalistic belief in miracles and millenniums. The father of the Social Gospel movement in America was Walter Rauschenbusch, an ardent Ritschlian like Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann, champions of the Social Gospel in Germany. The Social Gospel did not expect Jesus ever literally to return. This was a kind of demythologized Post-millennialism. The Kingdom of God, a social Utopia, would arrive instead of a literal second coming of Christ. The apocalyptic second coming was often seen simply as the mythical symbol for a future age of the triumph of the gospel. It should be noted that not all Social Gospel advocates expected that this Kingdom would ever be realized, much less in their lifetime, but it was the goal toward which Christian efforts should be directed.

We must pause to note how several of the cardinal themes of Liberal theology interlock in the Social Gospel. The historical Jesus was seen as the inspiration for the new social crusade. This is clear in the writings of the Ritschlians Harnack (What is Christianity?), Herrmann (with Harnack, The Social Gospel), and Rauschenbusch (A Theology for the Social Gospel and The Social Principles of Jesus) and others (Shailer Mathews, Jesus on Social Institutions; Francis Greenwood Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Social Question). Even the incorporation of Darwinism into theology was manifest in the Social Gospel: God was viewed as being a creative force in the long and gradual process of evolution, a process now continuing in the crusade for a more perfect society. Liberals no more expected to usher in God's Kingdom in their own strength than they believed life had evolved by itself. God must be at work in both processes for them to succeed.

 

Liberal Theology

On the eve of the Great War, I believe we can see a wide theological consensus (albeit still resisted by conservatives and fundamentalists) that looks like this. God is seen as immanent in the processes of evolution and social change, not standing transcendently above them. God’s Kingdom will be established on earth, if ever, through human reform efforts, not by a literal apocalyptic intervention of Christ. (Accordingly, as to personal afterlife most Liberals did not expect bodily resurrection but were satisfied with belief in the immortality of the soul). An optimistic, environmentalist view of sin led many Liberals to emphasize social reform and education over traditional evangelism.

God is seen as "miraculously" involved in the regularities, not the violations, of natural law. Jesus' healings may be explained in psychosomatic terms, while his virgin birth is almost always dismissed as myth. His resurrection is affirmed by some, doubted by others, and denied by a few, while still others point to its symbolic meaning and profess agnosticism as to what really happened. Traditional views of Christ as God incarnate give way to Christ being viewed as the perfect revelation of God in that he is the perfect human being, humans being made in God’s image. The fullness of God was in Jesus in that he was fully open to God. Jesus is our savior in that he enables us to share in some measure his own loving fellowship with the Father. Thus his life and teaching are central to faith, not his death and resurrection. His death is usually regarded as a powerful example of loving self-sacrifice, recalling the "moral influence" theory of Christ's death propounded in the late Middle Ages by Peter Abelard.

The Bible according to Liberal theology is not verbally inspired or infallible. It is rather a record of God's gradual revelation of himself through the religious experiences, not so much the beliefs, of the biblical characters and writers. The biblical writers were religious geniuses, more open to God than most, and their writings evidence this, but the writers were inspired people, not simply God's instruments used to produce inspired texts.

 

The Impact of the Great War          

I have said World War I closed the era of Liberal theology. How? In two ways. First, many German theologians, partly under the influence of Hegel, were inclined to see God manifest in their highly advanced culture, even in the German state itself. This led to what H. Richard Niebuhr would later call a "Christ of Culture" position: Christ became a figurehead for the values of the German culture and state, not a transcendent norm from which to critique them. As a result, many prominent theologians supported the imperialism and militarism of the Kaiser. One morning Karl Barth was shocked to read in the newspaper a statement affirming the Kaiser's policies signed by most of his old theology professors. This drove home to him the danger of identifying the seemingly sagest voices of human wisdom with the truth of God. If theology and philosophy could be so self-blinded as to baptize German imperialism, what other mistakes might they make?

But all this was merely symptomatic. Barth became convinced that once theology lost confidence that God had decisively revealed himself in his transcendent Word, then theology would make an idol of its own delusive experiences and clever God-concepts and worship that idol instead of the real God. Barth's scathing reaction to Liberal theology, set forth dramatically in his The Epistle to the Romans (1918) and lucidly in his 1923 exchange of letters with Harnack (published as Revelation and Theology), generated a theological movement that came to be called Neo-Orthodoxy, so called since it returned to a classical Reformation Protestantism, though without reneging on the advances of biblical criticism. Neo-Orthodoxy exalted revelation over religious experience, faith above reason.

Second, just as Karl Barth saw the War as the expose of Liberalism's deluded subjectivism, Reinhold Niebuhr (H. Richard Niebuhr’s brother) and others saw the terrible carnage of the War as the final refutation of Liberalism’s optimistic assessment of human perfectibility. The notion of original sin did not seem so implausible after mustard gas and trench warfare. Sin had to be taken more seriously, and Niebuhr's school of “Christian Realism" in politics and ethics sought to take it more seriously.

For a generation just before and after World War II, it was common to hear of a Neo-Orthodox Consensus in theology, replacing the Liberal Consensus that had reigned on the eve of the First World War. Even during that period, though, Liberalism had its champions like Henry Pitney Van Dusen (The Vindication of Liberal Theology; see also L. Harold DeWolf, The Religious Revolt against Reason), who claimed that Liberalism had been chastened by recent events but remained essentially unscathed and in need of very little retooling. But with the advent of the turbulent Sixties, a new Social Gospel of anti-war and civil rights protests erupted and along with it, Liberal Theology in many forms returned with a vengeance. I think it fair to say that the brand of theology spawned in the nineteenth century is still alive and well and continues to set the agenda for discussion even in many quarters where it is not embraced.

 

FOR FURTHER READING

 

Harry Emerson Fosdick, A Guide to Understanding the Bible. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1938, 1956.

John C. Greene, Darwin and the Modern World View. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961; New York: New American Library, 1963.

Thomas A. Langford, In Search of Foundations: English Theology 1900-1920. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969.

Hugh Ross Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology, Schleiermacher to Barth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, n.d.

John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, England and Germany. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: From Reimarus to Wrede. New York: Macmillan Company, 1962.

Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism & Social Reform, American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965.

Ronald C. White, Jr., and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel, Religion and Reform in Changing America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976.

 

 By Robert M. Price


 

Copyright©2009 by Robert M Price
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