AJ Muste's Theology

! A.J. Muste’s Theology: Tracing the Ideas that Shaped the Man Jeffrey D. Meyers M.A. Thesis Earlham School of Religion April 16, 2012 ! Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: A Short Biography 4 Chapter 2: The Theological Task 14 Chapter 3: Mysticism and the Inner Life 22 Chapter 4: The Social Gospel 34 Chapter 5: The Way of Love, the Way of the Cross 43 Chapter 6: Theological Anthropology 61 Chapter 7: Ecclesiology 81 Chapter 8: Eschatology: The Kingdom of God 101 Conclusions 115 Annotated Bibliography 121 Appendix 1a: Books Owned By Muste 150 Appendix 1b: Books Owned By Muste 158 Appendix 2: Authors Cited By Muste 176 Appendix 3: Books Assigned By Muste 191 Introduction Historians study the Reverend Abraham Johannes Muste primarily for his shaping of the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s, his work for peace from the mid 1930s through the 1960s, and his involvement in laying the foundations of the Civil Rights Movement.1 His leadership in these movements often gained him national attention––Time Magazine once labeled him “the No. 1 U.S. Pacifist.”2 Although most attempts at understanding this complex man have noted the influence of his Christian faith, few scholars have explored its true depth. The religious foundations of his life, thought, and work were often an embarrassment to those he worked with and those who admired him. In avoiding Muste’s faith, his contemporaries and scholars alike have missed the ways his theology undergirded and motivated his life and work. At heart, Muste was a theologian. He developed his theology by selectively drawing upon a diverse range of writers and theological traditions. He crafted a largely coherent worldview out of ideas drawn from branches of the church usually more interested in refuting each others’ ideas than in learning from each others’ strengths. Muste built his theology on the foundation laid by his West Michigan Dutch Reformed upbringing, yet he did so largely with ideas taken from the East Coast theological liberalism of New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. His engagement with the historic peace churches was often more as a critic than a student, yet he drew from these as well, adding the best of what he found to his extensive theological edifice. Even though Muste’s ideas reflect the traditions around him, he moved beyond each tradition, challenging them to more radical ways of living. These new ways of living are defined by the 1 Some of the best work has been done by Jo Ann Robinson, Leilah Danielson, and Joseph Kip Kosek. 2 Time Magazine 24, no. 2 (July 10, 1939): 37. 1 pursuit of peace, equality, and justice. Muste’s theology and pacifism worked in a symbiotic relationship. His theology engendered and informed his pacifism, but his pacifism was often the motivation for his theological work. Muste’s engagement with a wide variety of traditions and thinkers helped keep him from getting swept along with the intellectual trends of his time. Instead, he often forged his own path, one that avoided the extremes found around him. He rarely fit into established categories. In some circumstances, this meant that he took up marginalized positions against the dominant trends. In others, it resulted in him becoming the trendsetter. In all circumstances, he functioned as a prophet, able to critique even the most widely accepted ideas. A remarkable speaker and writer, A.J. Muste left behind a massive quantity of writings. The author of only two full length books, Muste authored or co-authored hundreds of articles, pamphlets, and essays. Additionally, much unpublished material has survived, including lecture notes, transcripts of speeches, and letters.3 A survey of most of Muste’s theology can be pieced together from these sources. While he never set out to write theology as such, his writings contain a substantial amount of theological reflection. Although the theological basis of his thought is most evident in pieces he wrote for Christian audiences, it can also be found under the surface of works aimed at secular and mixed audiences. No previous work has set out to examine Muste’s theology. By drawing on the full range of available sources, we will identify and describe the most prominent theological themes in Muste’s works. This effort is admittedly incomplete. For example, the extant material does not allow for a full description of how Muste’s theology changed over time. More often, we must 3 The Swarthmore College Peace Collection alone has over 24 linear feet of material, much of it unpublished. 2 take the result and work backward to hypothesize about its development. In some cases, we must take as our starting point Muste’s theology as expressed in the late 1930s and 1940s, since this was the period when his theology is most explicitly present in the available sources. This may overlook changes in his theology between that time and his death in 1967. Even so, the available sources allow for a fairly detailed description of much of Muste’s theology. The origins of Muste’s unique theological vision can occasionally be traced through the citations provides in his writings; however, many of his articles, speeches, and sermons do not provide any mention of his sources. The task of discerning the origins of his ideas is most often a work of hypothesis and conjecture. In the absence of direct citations, we can make assumptions based on the content of texts we know Muste read. In some cases, we have his copies of books and can reference his notes in them (see appendix 1). For the most part, this paper limits itself to texts that Muste either owned, cited (appendix 2), or assigned for classes he taught (appendix 3). Occasionally, other reasons are offered for why it can be assumed that Muste read a specific text. Certainly other, unknown, sources influenced him in similar ways. While this study primarily focuses on written sources, Muste’s personal interactions with other people also clearly shaped his thought. These influences are usually difficult or impossible to trace. Despite the necessary incompleteness of such an investigation, much useful material can be found to show how Muste drew upon a huge range of sources in constructing his theology. The first chapter provides an outline of Muste’s life with an emphasis on his encounters with different Christian traditions. Subsequent sections will refer to the biographical information contained in this first chapter. Chapter two explores Muste’s understanding of the theological task and the importance he placed on Christians using the mind to seriously engage with 3 questions of faith. The third chapter examines the influence of Christian mysticism on Muste’s thought and practice. The fourth chapter analyzes Muste as a representative of the social gospel tradition, especially as it emerged at Union Theological Seminary in New York around Walter Rauschenbusch’s work. In the fifth chapter, “The Way of Love, the Way of the Cross,” we begin to encounter more of Muste’s original theology. It presents Muste’s theology of the Christian “way,” one defined by suffering love. Chapter six focuses on Muste’s theologically based understanding of human identity and the human condition. The seventh chapter investigates Muste’s view of the Christian church, its potential, and its calling. The final chapter tries to make sense of Muste’s beliefs about the kingdom of God. After the first, each chapter explores Muste’s theology in the context of the authors and writings that influenced him and examines the probable origins of his thought. They show how Muste incorporated ideas from a diverse array of traditions to form and shape his theology. His interactions with many traditions and his unwillingness to align himself fully with any particular group granted him an unusual level of independence and allowed him to stand above the intellectual trends of his time, critiquing even the most widely held assumptions. While we will not seek to systematically prove it here, his deep theological reflection motivated and shaped his remarkable life and work. Chapter 1: A Short Biography The Reformed Church in America. Abraham Johannes Muste was born on January 8, 1885 in Zierikzee, an obscure port town in the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands. In 1891 his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He grew up 4 saturated in the Reformed tradition prevalent among the Dutch immigrants of that part of Michigan. His family belonged to the slightly less conservative and more assimilationist of the two U.S. Dutch Reformed denominations, the Reformed Church in America (RCA).4 Of the political leanings of the Dutch Calvinists, Muste writes, “one no more thought that a church member could vote the Democratic ticket than that he could beat his wife, or steal, or have extramarital sexual relations.” The sober and hardworking Dutch immigrants were also strongly against union organizing, a tendency Muste would later overcome.5 At age thirteen, Muste stated that he wanted to go into the ministry and was able on that basis to obtain the scholarships necessary for him to attend the RCA’s preparatory school at Hope College in Holland, Michigan and then Hope College itself. A number of anecdotes exist from this time about his occasional disregard for the school’s strict rules. Early in preparatory school, for instance, he was caught abusing the privileges of his job at the college library by tasting of the “forbidden fruit” of the books on evolution, which were restricted to supervised use by college upperclassmen.6 His intellectual curiosity and skill began to earn him recognition during this time.

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