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This chapter traces the intellectual history of the canon among liberal Christians of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Hicksite Quakers, it moves through William Ellery Channing's Unitarianism, the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, the transition from Transcendentalism to Catholicism of Orestes Brownson, and finally the liberal congregationalism of Horace Bushnell. It demonstrates how the convergence of various intellectual trends in the nineteenth century—such as skepticism, sentimentalism, and biblical criticism—combined to push prominent American thinkers toward a concept of an open canon.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed both the golden age of American Calvinism and its decline. Increasing fragmentation among Calvinistic voices as well as the rise of competition from non‐Calvinistic Protestants and Roman Catholics contributed to a vital but also chaotic theological period. A number of key Calvinist leaders published important works during this era, and public debates over theology were influenced by a number of decisive events not only within the denominations but also in public life. By the 1850s, leading voices like Horace Bushnell and Catherine Beecher were beginning to challenge the once settled principles of American Calvinist theology.

This chapter surveys a wide range of historic works on marriage and family. The first two sections place Jesus' teaching against the family, Paul's indifference toward marriage and family, and the New Testament's household codes against the backdrop of the Greco-Roman emphasis on the family as the fundamental social cell. The following sections assess Augustine's affirmation of marriage in light of ambiguous patristic teaching, and medieval attempts to institutionalize marriage as a vocation roughly on a par with singleness. The final sections examine Reformation and Puritan themes, and three attempts by 19th-century theologians — Friedrich Schleiermacher, Horace Bushnell, and F. D. Maurice — to bolster the family in response to the rise of modern liberal social and political thought.

Chapter 5 maintains that the slavery debates led antislavery moderates to historicize the faith. After exploring the various roots of historicism in antebellum religious thought and the failures of the antebellum biblical controversies involving geology and temperance to generate historical reasoning, the fifth chapter examines the antislavery theology of E. P. Barrows, Horace Bushnell, and Samuel Harris. This chapter ends with an account of the impact of the Civil War on the development of American theology.

Chapter thirty-eight treats the threat of German Idealist thought as it came to influence the thinking of those who considered themselves part of the Reformed tradition. Particularly important in this regard stand: John Williamson Nevin, Charles Finney, and Horace Bushnell. Hodge considered each of these men as dangerous threats to traditional Reformed orthodoxy as they spread their own versions of the redemptive power of human moral intuition.

The book's last chapter explores the ecological implications of this Calvinist spirituality of desire. It points to the earth's reflection of God's beauty as a foundation for an environmental ethic in the Reformed tradition, but also deals with the ethical quandary of frustrated desire in the earth's experience of evolutionary change. Drawing on the work of Christopher Southgate, Jürgen Moltmann, and Holmes Rolston, it reflects on God's own entry into a world torn by desire, emphasizing the eschatological hope that has always characterized Reformed ethics. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Horace Bushnell's nineteenth-century discussion of the wildness of God and the need to move beyond a simplistic theodicy in explaining God's ways in the world.

Thinkers unconnected to institutions were the most lively and creative thinkers in the US for much of the nineteenth century. These ‘amateurs’ were more willing to adopt untraditional, usually German, ideas; and they moved more quickly to modern, secular ideas. The most important of these thinkers were James Marsh of Vermont, who introduced Kantian ideas into America; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading Transcendentalist; Connecticut minister Horace Bushnell, who followed Nathaniel William Taylor in remaking the theology of New England and leading it to figurative and metaphorical interpretations of the Bible; John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff of the Mercersburg Seminary in Pennsylvania, who meditated on an organicist Protestant theology; and The St Louis Hegelians.

The Civil War was a decisive chapter in the history of American theology. While the leading theological commentators on the war continued to rely on the theological constructs that had been developed during the early years of the republic, more and more Americans found these constructs inadequate. One of the great ironies of the war era was that while theologians North and South found it very difficult to transcend the political–religious ideologies of their own regions, a few laypeople broke through to more profound theological insight. The most remarkable example was President Abraham Lincoln who, especially in his Second Inaugural Address, reached levels of theological profundity that none of the more thoroughly Americanized theologians reached.

Girls figure prominently in mid-nineteenth-century adoption fiction, as evidenced by Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1851) and Susanna Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854). These novels, set when statutes governing adoption were still vague and reflecting the importance of nurture as articulated by Horace Bushnell, acknowledge American opportunities while acknowledging European roots. Warner’s protagonist, Ellen, pays homage to the Old World on a visit to blood relatives, the Lindsays, but ultimately affirms her commitment to the New World. Gerty, in contrast, exercises her independence in The Lamplighter but reunites with her birth father in an expression of solidarity with Old World genealogy. Both novels contribute to a sense of identity as inherited and adoptive and to a construction of nation in dialogue with but independent of England.

This chapter begins with an examination of the evangelical movement among African Americans, including the testimonies of ex-slaves and the spiritual autobiographies of George White and Jarena Lee. It then considers the role of conversion in the Second Great Awakening. Although there was no overarching unity to this awakening, the revival profoundly shaped an emerging generic Protestant evangelicalism. However, not all were pleased with this age of revivalism. John Williamson Nevin and Horace Bushnell, two products of the revival, eventually became its most vociferous critics and questioned the notion of instantaneous conversions. In the industrial age, Walter Rauschenbusch articulated a view of conversion as social reconstruction, and in the twentieth century, Billy Graham appeared as the charismatic champion of “born-again” religion. The chapter concludes with a discussion of young evangelicals who questioned the individualistic emphasis of evangelical conversion and of others who left the evangelical fold and converted to Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

This chapter describes a culture of contradictions where religiously liberal people tend to be socially conservative, where the pulpits' descriptions of truth conflict with the daily reality known in the pews, and where parsonage females bear the brunt of these incongruities. Unitarian women who treasure their freedom from punishing Calvinist creeds and who revel in stretching their minds as they study the Bible in light of their reason and conscience complain of being betrayed by the pulpits' blind‐sided optimism and coldly cerebral sermons. Increasingly, too, they protest that the cult of domestic religion and separate spheres, as canonized by Horace Bushnell, violates the Unitarian values of equity and inclusion. The double standard of authorship and separatist ideology distort and diminish the women's posthumous reputations.

Chapter forty-two examines one of the most titanic theological battles of Hodge’s career. It recounts the many articles published in the Repertory and Bibliotheca Sacra as Hodge and Edwards Amasa Park at Andover Seminary sparred over the exact nature and reliability of biblical language. Park argued that for a different between figurative and descriptive language in the Bible. Hodge held that no such distinction existed. Reason alone could understand the Bible; an intuitive faculty was not needed, nor was it reliable.

Edwards Amasa Park championed Edwardsian Calvinism from the Jacksonian era until the very close of the nineteenth century. His own training at Andover in the irenic divinity of Moses Stuart and Leonard Woods, his application as rhetorician of the work of Hugh Blair and George Campbell and his exposure in Germany to the Vermittlungstheologie of Friedrich Tholuck gave specific definition to his theological project. Park ought not to be viewed as a romantic idealist in the line of Horace Bushnell or as a proto-liberal in advance of the Andover liberals who succeeded him. Instead he commingled epistemology and methodology derived from Lockean empiricism, Baconian induction, natural theology, and Scottish commonsense realism. As a formidable apologist for his revivalist inheritance, Park conserved the substance and prolonged the influence New England Theology by securing for it modes of expression well fitted to his nineteenth-century audience.

Ives’s essay on Emerson is less a description of that writer than an apologia for Ives’s compositional method, which is intentionally disunified and based on the discontinuous way in which humans perceive reality. The idea that Ives was a Transcendentalist himself (like Emerson) is difficult to maintain given the other, more conventional religious influences evident in Ives’s thinking. But there is a strong parallel between the way Emerson left the church at age 29, and Ives left the music world at page 27, both because they could no longer carry on the conventions of those worlds in good conscience.

This chapter focuses on nineteenth-century western Europe and America, where contested gender identities take a more strident form with the emergence of feminism. Waves of male historians and archaeologists who studied the ancient Mediterranean world sought to reread the roots of European society as a story of the rise of patriarchy from an earlier matriarchy. This theme was taken up by socialism and early feminism and reinterpreted to affirm liberative hopes for an emerging socialist and/or feminist society. This chapter also looks at three nineteenth-century thinkers who employed both the idealization and the denigration of women's nature to enforce the reigning views of women's necessarily limited sphere: August Comte, Horace Bushnell, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Chapter forty-three recounts Hodge’s views on the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture. He believed in “plenary” not “partial” inspiration. Every word of the Bible was true, and it was the word that God intended to use to convey His meaning. The words of Scripture had fixed meanings that did not change over time or were not bound by culture. Hodge believed that the meaning of the Bible was readily accessible to everyone who approached the text carefully using their rational faculty. He thought that emotions arose as a response to what the rational mind interpreted the Scriptures to mean. One did not begin with emotion to study the Bible. One always began with reason.

Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.