For several generations, historians have generally viewed antebellum American Protestants as living somewhere in the camps of sola scriptura, prima scriptura or nuda scriptura. As external authority was minimised or rejected, Protestant theological debates focused on biblical content to the near exclusion of everything else.
In a pathbreaking, comprehensive and thoroughly researched monograph, Paul Gutacker challenges the generally accepted account of Protestant thinking in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. In Gutacker's view, ‘even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition … most American Protestants found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, wrote about the Christian past, and argued about its implications for the present’ (p. 3). In short, leading antebellum Protestant intellectuals balanced their biblicism with a very strong dose of ecclesiastical history.
In so doing, Gutacker makes a bold claim and, fortunately, presents voluminous evidence to support his argument. The list of sources employed, which includes multi-volume histories, sermons, speeches, journal articles and other documents, is staggering. When combined, the notes and bibliography are ninety pages long, compared to the actual text of 146 pages. The ideological range of sources is great, as the initial authors he cited include European churchmen such as Johann Lorenz von Mosheim and Joseph Milner as well as sceptics such as Edward Gibbon and David Hume. Gutacker's account also provides significant detail on nearly a hundred American Protestants who advocated for the importance of the Christian past.
The book is divided into three sections. The first describes how Baptists John Leland and Isaac Backus joined Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in using church history to argue for the separation of Church and State in the early republic. In the same era, Baptists, Methodists and Restorationists all used the religious past to promote their brand of Christianity. The second section focuses on how in the early nineteenth century, the religious education of children, women and African Americans all included church history. At the same time, leading Protestant seminaries promoted the teaching of ecclesiastical history partly in response to the influx of Catholics into the United States. The last segment describes how church history was central to mid-century debates regarding the proper role of women and whether slavery was or was not compatible with Christianity. In short, Gutacker shows how in these political, social and theological debates, ‘American Protestants never read or argued over, the Bible alone’ (p. 9).
One of the pleasures that come with reading this book is discovering that many Protestant leaders formed unexpected intellectual alliances. William Findlay, a Presbyterian opposed to any state support for Churches, used Edward Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire to show how persecutions under Christian emperors was even more diabolical than those led by Nero and Domitian. By contrast, the Anglican historian Joseph Milner praised many medieval Christians, particularly regarding the Catholic Church's commitment to missions. The Quaker leader Benjamin Lundy was among the many Protestant abolitionists who praised Pope Gregory xvi’s condemnation of the slave trade and supported the pope's contention that European Christians had long worked for the elimination of European slavery. However, the Catholic bishop John England responded by saying that Gregory's condemnation of the slave trade pertained only to the transatlantic slave trade and also quoted several Church Fathers who proclaimed that ‘slavery was granted by God as a consequence of man's sin’ (p. 113).
Interestingly, this book suggests that there were subtle changes in how Protestants used historical information. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ministers sometimes turned to church history for instruction on difficult subjects. For instance, in 1804, Daniel Merrill concluded that infant baptism departed from early Christian practice and, therefore, that he could no longer serve as a Congregationalist pastor. He and his entire congregation joined the Baptists. By mid-century, however, Protestants (and Catholics) increasingly mined church history for historical ‘proofs’ to support theological positions already taken. That led to an odd situation where Protestant abolitionists defended the pope while southern Catholics disagreed with him. Similarly, Black scholars emphasised the contributions that Augustine and other African Church Fathers made to the Christian tradition only to be ignored by southern white Protestants inconvenienced by their arguments.
I would have enjoyed a greater discussion of how social class affected the acceptance of church history as a discipline. Without a doubt, Gutacker convincingly demonstrates how well-educated white men, women and African Americans used the Christian past to support their religious concerns. However, the importance of ecclesiastical history for the majority of Baptists and Methodists is not quite as clear. Granted, James Boyce, the founder of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued that church history should be a key element of theological education. Martin Ruter, a Methodist, had an enormous impact by publishing historical works through the Methodist Book Concern, the most important of which was his own Concise history of the Christian Church. However, many Baptists and Methodists opposed seminary education generally, let alone historical training within those institutions. As of 1859, the number of Presbyterian, Congregational and Episcopalian seminarians was four times the number of Baptist and Methodist seminarians even though the latter two groups far outnumbered their more established brethren. Considering the lack of formal seminary training among Baptists and Methodists, the nation's largest Protestant denominations, it is possible that even in the late nineteenth century, the church history revolution was incomplete as sola scriptura maintained its influence among less-educated Protestants. That discussion, however, would require a book in itself and it is understandable that Gutacker did not explore that topic in greater detail.
In sum, The old faith in a new nation deserves a wide readership. This book is an outstanding work of intellectual history that greatly enhances our understanding of the development of Protestant theology between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
