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Augustus Hopkins Strong and the Struggle to Reconcile Christian eology with Modern ought • John Aloisi Copyright © by John Aloisi CC BY-ND All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published University of Rochester Press Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY , USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box , Woodbridge, Suolk IP DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-: -- -- (paperback) ISBN-: ---- (ePUB) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Aloisi, John, author. Title: Augustus Hopkins Strong and the struggle to reconcile Christian theology with modern thought / John Aloisi. Description: Rochester, NY, USA : University of Rochester Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identi­ers: LCCN | ISBN (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Strong, Augustus Hopkins, –. | Baptists—Doctrines— History. | Philosophy and religion. | eology. | Monism. Classi­cation: LCC BX .S A | DDC /.—dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ is book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pilot uses cutting-edge publishing technology to produce open access digital editions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs from leading university presses. Free digital editions can be downloaded from: Books at JSTOR, EBSCO, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and many other open repositories. While the digital edition is free to download, read, and share, the book is under copyright and covered by the following Creative Commons License: BY-ND. Please consult www.creativecommons.org if you have questions about your rights to reuse the material in this book. When you cite the book, please include the following URL for its Digital Object Identi­er (DOI): https://doi.org/. / We are eager to learn more about how you discovered this title and how you are using it. We hope you will spend a few minutes answering a couple of questions at this url: https://www.longleafservices.org/shmp-survey/ More information about the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot can be found at https://www.longleafservices.org. Acknowledgments ix Introduction e Making and Ministry of a eologian Philosophical Background of Ethical Monism Ethical Monism as Both a Conclusion and a Starting Point for eology Ethical Monism and Its Impact on Other Areas of Strong’s eology Contemporary Responses and the Legacy of Strong’s Ethical Monism Conclusion Notes Bibliography Unlike ­nancial debts, one’s academic and familial debts can never be fully re- paid. Nevertheless, I wish to express my thankfulness to a number of people who have supported and encouraged me in various ways while I completed this book. When I began my doctoral studies in , my wife, Marcia, and I moved to Louisville, Kentucky, with two children in tow. As I came to the end of the doctoral program, our family had grown to include six children. Somewhat co- incidentally, like Augustus and Harriet Strong, at that point we had been blessed with four girls and two boys. As this book has come to completion, we now have eight. ankfully, I have a very patient and supportive wife! ank you, Marcia, for consistently encouraging me to keep moving forward, and thank you for reading countless papers and even this longer work with genuine interest and helpful insight. Many others have also provided support along the way. David Doran and the board of Detroit Baptist eological Seminary have generously ensured that I had the necessary time and resources to complete this project. My colleagues at DBTS have encouraged me at many points over the past several years. Mark Snoeberger, especially, took time out of his busy schedule to read an earlier ver- sion of the manuscript and provided many helpful comments. Matt Gass, An- drea Miller Studdard, and Ryan Meyer of DBTS, along with the interlibrary loan sta of James P. Boyce Library at Southern Baptist eological Seminary, have tracked down scores of articles and books for me and have done so with cheerfulness and e ciency. Tom Nettles was one of the early readers of the manuscript, and over the years he has been a joy to work with. His graciousness has been an example to me, and I consider his scholarship a model to follow. I could not have asked for a better mentor. John Aloisi Allen Park, Michigan ix Introduction - was characterized by a dis- tinctive emphasis on the doctrine of divine immanence, as observed N by numerous writers at the end of the century and the beginning of the next. For example, reecting on the theology of the nineteenth century, Arthur Cushman McGiert identied divine immanence as the characteristic doctrine of the age. Standing just inside the doorstep of the twentieth century, Francis J. McConnell noted that the concept of divine immanence was the most absorbing theme in contemporary theology. Writing just a few years later in , Hugh Ross Mackintosh remarked, “No conception has seized the modern mind more powerfully than that of divine immanence.” Clearly, the doctrine of divine immanence was a topic that captivated the minds of many theologians at the turn of the century. At the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, Amer- ican theological liberals were busy carving out a “third way” between rationalis- tic atheism and orthodox Christianity by positing a new theology based largely on the twin ideas that divine authority is not tied to an inerrant book and that God should not be viewed as completely distinct from the material world. When put in positive terms, this latter concept was oen expressed by the phrase divine immanence. Numerous books were written around the turn of the century ar- guing that the pressing theological need was to move toward a new understand- ing of God as immanent in the world and working in and through the physical universe in a way quite dierent from that taught by orthodox theology. Many conservatives rmly denounced liberal assertions about God’s immanence as heterodox and destructive to true religion. However, at least one conservative theologian, Augustus Hopkins Strong (– ), attempted to wed orthodox theology to a new understanding of divine immanence. e result was some- thing that Strong called ethical monism. e Riddle of Augustus Hopkins Strong Strong was in many ways a puzzling gure. As president and professor of bib- lical theology at Rochester eological Seminary for four decades (– ), Introduction Strong shaped a generation of seminary students. As a leader among Northern Baptists, he played a signicant role in the denomination during the years lead- ing up to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. As the author of numerous books, including a major systematic theology, Strong inuenced the thinking of countless theologians and pastors. He was by any measure an important gure in American theology at the beginning of the twentieth century, yet Strong has persistently baed historians. Grant Wacker noted that Strong’s interpreters have generally placed him in one of four categories: (a) an early fundamentalist who was both irenic and open-minded, (b) a conservative theologian struggling to preserve Reformed orthodoxy in a modern world, (c) a mediator between liberalism and orthodox theology, or (d) “a closet liberal hiding behind the garments of apparent ortho- doxy.” Wacker himself never indicated which of these categories he thought best described Strong. Instead, he argued that “Strong is best understood as a tragic gure, forced to choose between incompatible yet, in his judgment, equally cogent conceptual worlds.” Part of the di­culty in interpreting Strong lies in some of his own enigmatic statements and actions. Near the end of his life Strong wrote, “I am an evo- lutionist, but evolutionist of a peculiar sort. I am a higher critic, but of a certain sort. I am both a premillennialist and a postmillennialist, strange as this may seem to some.” If these self-appellations appeared somewhat less than consistent, so did a number of his decisions during his presidency at Roches- ter eological Seminary. For example, in the s Strong, along with several other faculty members at Rochester, expressed serious concern about the or- thodoxy of their promising young student Walter Rauschenbusch (– ). Strong once told Rauschenbusch that his essay on Horace Bushnell’s theory of the atonement, although of very high quality, was “subversive of scripture.” In fact, the theological errors Strong detected in this essay prompted him to oer several “corrective lectures” to the entire class. is was not the only time Raus- chenbusch expressed his a­nity for unorthodox views during his student days. Shortly before graduation, Rauschenbusch preached a chapel sermon in which he described personal conversion in terms of liberal presuppositions. Although Strong had signicant reservations about his student’s doctrinal delity, about a decade later Strong hired Rauschenbusch to teach at Rochester, even though the younger man had only continued the departure from orthodoxy since grad- uation. If Rauschenbusch were the only modernist Strong added to the Roch- ester faculty, one might regard it as an isolated lapse of judgment, but he was not: during his forty-year tenure Strong also hired other liberal scholars, such Introduction as William Arnold Stevens (), Walter R. Betteridge ( ), J. W. A. Stewart ( ), Cornelius Woelin ( ), and Conrad Henry Moehlman ( ). Another factor contributing to the dilemma of interpreting Strong stems from the fact that his own theology evolved considerably during his career at Rochester. e most signicant change in his theology occurred in the early to mid- s, when he developed ethical monism. Strong’s explanation of ethical monism did not change substantially over the years.

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