Romanticism in America

Romanticism in America

Romantic challenge fo rationalism

• Unitarians: William Ellery Channing
  • accomodating "biblical" teaching with rationalist approach to interpretation
• Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • appealed to inner life, intuition … "I don't need to turn to the Bible to find revelation, I can look within myself."

Seeking to return American church to founding principles of Reformation

• Nevin & Schaff (transform humanity – not individuals)
• Horace Bushnell (attacking individualism of revivals)
  • influenced the developing Sunday School movement
  • the experience of the Civil War and the confrontation with slavery led to a need for corporate atonement, not just individual

Slavery & Black Religion

• Bushnell concern for the morality of slavery emphasizes the need account for the "full consequences of slavery and non-emancipation"
• American slavery was distinctive in identifying slavery with race
• evangelicals in England, Quakers in America led opposition to slavery
• Black identification with the freeing of the Israelites in the Exodus and the unjust suffering of Jesus on the cross
• Slavery represents in the strongest terms the unfulfilled dream of the city on a hill
  • the unfulfilled dream of Puritan America

PBS special

A valuable recent production on PBS gives an overview of the Black Church experience in 4 hours

• Henry Louis Gates Jr. narrating: https://www.pbs.org/weta/black-church/
• For the moment these are available on Youtube at:
  • https://youtu.be/BijAOYktT4k and https://youtu.be/AnT3cTNU-ZI

Liberation theology of the later 20th c.

• James Cone and Black Theology
• W. E. B. Du Bois
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• South Africa experience (Koinonia movement)

Ongoing issues left over from 18th c.

• How do politics and science affect theology? (206)
• distrust of authority
• Reason vs. Enthusiasm
• challenge of slavery to American experience