Baptist contributions to liberalism

Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr, 2000 by E. Glenn Hinson

Looking at what has happened among Baptists, especially Baptists in the South, during the past two decades, many readers may expect a very short article. Much more, they will assume, could be written about Baptist contributions to liberalism's opposite and bitter enemy, fundamentalism. Indeed, according to some fundamentalists, Baptists have been the stalwart and persistent carriers of the fundamentalist torch of biblical inerrancy from the beginning of their history, so that the use of the words Baptist and Liberal together is at best an anomaly and at worst a contradiction in terms. On the other hand, Baptist and fundamentalist are virtually synonymous.

For persons not well versed in Baptist history, therefore, this article may occasion some surprise. Baptists, even in the South, have raised up some contributors and made some major contributions to American theological liberalism. As a matter of fact, William R. Hutchinson, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard, concluded from intensive study of The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism that "after the Methodists, the two groups most deeply affected [by liberalism] were the Baptists and the Disciples." (1) Many will think of course of a few names such as C. H. Toy, who departed the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1879 to assume a position at Harvard because he found the historical critical interpretation of Scriptures the only method he could use with integrity; Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the leading lights in the Social Gospel movement and the framer of a theology for it; William Newton Clarke, a professor at the Hamilton (later Colgate) Theological Seminary who systematized liberal theology in An Outline of Christian Theology (1898); and Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Riverside Baptist Church in New York City and "the most widely-known religious liberal of the 1920s." (2) More easily overlooked are the Baptist institutions that took the lead not merely in importing to the United States and refashioning the ideas of Friedrich Schleiermacher, widely recognized as the "father" of liberalism, Albrecht Ritschl, the preeminent theologian of liberalism, and Ernst Troeltsch, architect of the socio-historical method, but addressing in creative ways the peculiar needs of the contemporary American setting. Rauschenbusch, of course, taught at Colgate Rochester Theological Seminary, but the institution which self-consciously carried the liberal banner from its refounding in 1891 under the presidency of William Rainey Harper was the University of Chicago. Almost all of the faculty of the divinity school were Baptists active in forming the Northern Baptist Convention.

Although thorough weighing of evidence will not let one say that Baptists in the South contributed significantly to the molding and spreading of liberal theology, it left quite clear traces in the thinking of Baptist ministers through colleges such as Wake Forest and through Southern Seminary. Edwin McNeill Poteat almost equalled Fosdick in national prominence as a preacher. As president of Wake Forest College (now University), he did much to shape it in the liberal tradition. E. Y. Mullins brought to Southern Seminary some of the more progressive perspectives of Baptists in the North after serving several years as a pastor in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. (3) His own theology owed some of its experiential slant not only to his personal experience but to Friedrich Schleiermacher. The journal Mullins started in 1904, Review & Expositor, regularly landed on the side of progressives rather than fundamentalists in the fight between them. W. O. Carver, for instance, took strong exception to J. Gresham Machen's slashing attack on modernism in Christianity and Liberalism, (4) charging him with overgeneralizing and misrepresenting "the opposition against which he is contending." Although he admitted that many things in liberalism put it in the category of a "different religion," he did not find the "legalistic, externally dogmatic interpretations" of Machen any better. "His interpretation of Christianity is far too external and too dependent on formal logic," he said. In fact, Machen resorted so much to legalism that he left no room for the Holy Spirit. Carver took issue with the whole Princetonian tendency to denigrate the work and progress of the Spirit in human culture. (5) E. Y. Mullins's contribution to The Fundamentals, twelve volumes of essays published between 1910 and 1915, can hardly be cited in support of the fundamentalist agenda; it was about religious experience, (6) that Schleiermacherian emphasis that terrified the fundamentalists!

The truth is, Baptists supplied major players in American theological liberalism. (7) Two of Kenneth Cauthen's five representatives of "evangelical liberalism" (William Adams Brown, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Walter Rauschenbusch, A.C. Knudson, and Eugene W. Lyman) and two of the three shapers of "modernistic liberalism" (Shailer Mathews, Douglas Clyde Macintosh, and Henry Nelson Wieman) were Baptists. Recognition of the fascination liberalism had in its heyday for this denomination raises intriguing questions: Is there something inherent in the Baptist tradition that pulls Baptists toward the liberal and modernist outlook? Are there affinities between the Baptist tradition and liberalism that explain the lure of liberalism for thinking Baptists deeply committed to their tradition? I'll return to those questions in a final section of this article.