Does the History of Theology Still Matter?

E. Brooks Holifield. Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. ix + 617 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Historians of American religion and culture who care about the history of ideas, especially the history of New England theology, feel a little bereft. Their colleagues seem to have deserted them to study visual culture, lived religion, gender, ritual, colonial encounter, sexuality, immigration, and diaspora and look glassy-eyed at the very mention of the New Divinity movement or the Unitarian controversy. In Protestant scholasticism, angels may not have danced on the heads of pins, but they might as well have. "Of all the questions you might want to ask/ about angels, the only one you ever hear/ is how many can dance on a head of a pin," the poet Billy Collins writes. "What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,/ their diet of unfiltered divine light?" The politely muffled yawns seem to suggest that there have to be more interesting and material questions in American religious and cultural history than the fate of Calvinist metaphysics. ¹

E. Brooks Holifield, at work on this history of Theology in America for much of his distinguished career, knows that the historiographical terrain has shifted under him and confesses as much at the outset: "I have written this book during an era in which most students of American religion have turned their attention away from literate elites, the history of ideas, the abstractions of intellectuals, and the activities of leaders" (p. viii). Gone are the days when the Protestant theological interests of Yale's Sydney Ahlstrom, Holifield's esteemed mentor, dominated this domain of inquiry. Gone are the days when even an iconoclastic soul like the University of Chicago's Sidney Mead cut his teeth in the field by doing an in-depth study of Nathaniel William Taylor and the New Haven Theology. Gone, too, are the days when Neoorthodoxy offered a credible intellectual framework for legitimating the recovery of New England Calvinism for believers and unbelievers alike (Joseph Haroutunian and Perry Miller come to mind). As Holifield's masterful work takes its place in this new terrain, it is worth asking the pointed and tendentious question: does the history of theology still matter in the study of American religion and culture?

I was certainly hard-pressed to convince many of our graduate students that it did when I put Holifield's book front and center for discussion in our monthly reading group on American religious history. They seemed to view the choice as stemming from some perverse filiopiety that compels me to hold onto a tradition of scholarship that is otherwise best relinquished. I felt like I might as well have been assigning Frank Hugh Foster's A Genetic History of the New England Theology (1907), which begins with this paean: "Descendant of Puritan and Pilgrim as I am, born and baptized in one of our most ancient Massachusetts churches, trained at our oldest university, and taught my profession at the center of intensest interest in 'the New England theology,' it would be strange if I had not begun this history with a feeling of the warmest appreciation of our New England Fathers." ² No doubt it did not help Holifield's cause (or mine) that the book the group had previously taken up for discussion was Mark A. Noll's America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002). Admittedly, Holifield's tome is slimmer than Noll's (617 pages compared to 622), but still, joined together, that amounts to a lot of reading on the history of anything, theology included. The combination is not for the faint of heart.

The pairing, though, is impossible to avoid. It would be difficult to review Holifield's monumental work without some attempt to distinguish it from Noll's similarly imposing and closely linked volume...