Religion, Progress, and Professional Historians

September/October 2007 Historically Speaking 17 tant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1 8591900 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988) won the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Pri^efrom the American Society of Church History. ' William R. Hutchison, "Liberal Protestantism and the 'End of Innocence,'" AmericanQuarterly 15 (1963): 136, 138. 2T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace:Antimodernism andthe Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Pantheon, 1981), 23, 25. 'James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in GreatBritain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 239. ' Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Cornell University Press, 2000), 77. * Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Reugion, 1805-1900 (John Knox Press, 2001), 403, 41 1 . "Theodore T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883), 11,6. " LT Townsend, The Bible and OtherAncientLiterature in the Nineteenth Century (Chautauqua Press, 1888), 192-93. "Stuart Robinson, "The Pulpit and Skeptical Culture," Princeton Review, 4th ser., 3 (1879): 147. "F.H.Johnson, "Theistic Evolution," Andover Review \ (1884): 365 (original is in italics). Additional expressions of this idea can be found in Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: ProtestantIntellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 137-38. "George T. Ladd, "History and the Concept of God," Bibliotbeca Sacra 37 (1880): 599; Alexander V. G. Allen, "The Theological Renaissance of the Nineteenth Century," Princeton Review, n. s., 10 (1882): 280-81. '' Howard MacQueary, TAe Evolution of Man and Christianity (D. Appleton and Company, 1890), 251. 12George A. Gordon, Ultimate Conceptions of Faith (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), 134. " Newman Smyth, Old Faiths in New Light, 2nd ed. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879), 253. 14William Newton Clarke, An Outline of Christian Theology (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), 296, 234. 15 Lyman Abbott, 7"Af Evolution of Christianity (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1892), 123; Harry Emerson Fosdick, Christianity and Progress (Fleming H. Revell Company, 1922), 170. "Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion (Folds, Howard, and Hulbert, 1885), 141. 17 ShirleyJackson Case, "Education in Liberalism," in Vergilius Ferm, ed., Contemporary American Theology, vol. 1 (Round Table Press, Inc., 1932), 120. '"W. W. Fenn, "Modern Liberalism," AmericanJournalof Theology 17 (1913): 516-17. '"Fosdick, Christianity andProgress, 172-73, 175. 2,1 Reinhold Niebuhr, Does Civilisation Need Reugion? A Study in the SocialResources andLimitations of Religion in Modern Lift (Macmillan Company, 1927), 9-10. 21 Richard Wightman Fox, "The Niebuhr Brothers and the Liberal Protestant Heritage," in MichaelJ. Lacey, ed., Reugion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 94-115; Richard Wightman Fox, ReinholdNiebuhr: A Biography (Pantheon Books, 1985). Religion, Progress, and Professional Historians Bruce Kuklick Ido not believe in progress in history, but I could not hope to prove this position. And who would want to show that history is a set of tales with no good outcome? In their implicit commitment to the naturalistic study of the past, professional historians have helped to make my position respectable, but the guild has also helped to subvert coherent inquiry into the issue. Throughout the middle of the 19th century a revolution took place in historical thinking, centered on the "Higher Criticism " of the Bible. While its influence still pervades our conceptions of the past, historians have largely lost an understanding of the intellectual issues at stake. The "Lower Criticism" prevalent to that time had examined the ancient sources of the Bible to find the most authentic accounts and to see what the texts really said. On the contrary, the Higher Criticism asked unforgivingly if the texts stated or presupposed the truth. German scholars in particular treated the Bible as they would treat any other book they would engage with if they were testing its claims to truth and figuring out the manner of its composition. In analyzing biblical narratives in the New Testament, scholars rightfully suspected the virgin birth, Jesus' feeding of the multitudes, and his resurrection from the dead. This skepticism was notoriously associated with the LebenJesu (1835, 1836) of David Friedrich Strauss. Higher Criticism attacked the truth of certain assertions made in the Bible. The...