Reviewed by Mark Valeri | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Mark Valeri | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Mark Valeri, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia

Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. By E. Brooks Holifield. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 617 pages. $37.50 (cloth), $22.00 (paper).
E. Brooks Holifield begins with an apt reminder: Christian theology informed philosophy, ethics, literature, law, politics, social reform, and the everyday piety or lived religion of the common person in America from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. By theology he means studied reflection on the relationship between reason and revelation. Christian reasoning, in other words, saturated early American culture. A diligent reading of Theology in America requires no small amount of confidence in this claim. It is a comprehensive, chronologically ordered survey of the central beliefs of pastors, divines, and other American theologians, mostly Protestant, from Reformation antecedents through the Civil War. It is more focused and precise, but less readable, than the influential synthesis by Holifield's mentor, Sydney E. Ahlstrom.¹ Holifield presents nearly three hundred writers, more than five hundred pages organized into three major parts with twenty-six chapters, and eighty-two pages of notes. The length and style of the book—huge clumps of thinkers and schools summarized with little or no historiographic debate to lighten the load—will especially try the patience of historians inoculated against theology. Yet the cumulative effect, describing an intellectual tradition not merely of a small clerical elite but of a diverse and widespread population of Americans before the Civil War, persuades.	1
Holifield points to the interaction between Christian thought and nontheological discourses and, in this sense, his book parallels Mark A. Noll's equally ambitious intellectual history, America's God.² Whereas Noll focuses on the intercourse between theology and republican politics, however, Holifield emphasizes the relationship between theology and common assumptions about logic, epistemology, and science. American theology, to put it baldly, amounted to an assertion of the reasonableness of Christianity. As definitions of reasonableness changed, Holifield maintains, so did the major contours of theological writing and speaking. Five subthemes amplify Holifield's account. First, his preachers and divines maintained the practical import of doctrine: they looked to ethical conclusions and social implications. Second, Calvinism remained the most widespread theological tradition; the major tenets of Reformed theology (for example, sin and depravity, grace, scripture alone, the authority of divine law) held sway over most thinkers. Third, American theologians repeatedly engaged European thinkers. Fourth, the increasing importance of denominational categories in the early nineteenth century denoted fragmentation and specialization. Professional theologians working under the banner of Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Episcopalian identities taught in seminaries and published journals; populist theologians such as Baptists, restorationists, African American orators, Hicksite Quakers, and Mormons worked in quite different institutional settings. Fifth, academic and populist theologies nonetheless interacted and shaped each other.	2
These subthemes shape his narrative around the issues of reason and revelation. Part 1, on Calvinist origins, includes discussions of seventeenth-century Puritans such as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, and John Norton. They expressed the reasonableness of Protestant doctrine in terms of humanist (according to Holifield, Ramist) logic. In response to deist challenges in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Protestants such as Samuel Willard and Cotton Mather embraced Evidentialism or "evidential Christianity" (5): the correlation between natural theology (the evidences of God in nature, that is, creation and miracles) and revelation (the Bible). Holifield offers a separate chapter on Jonathan Edwards, who defended evangelical Protestantism on philosophical and moral grounds.	. . .

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