An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
Allusion has been made to a revision of traditional theology which took
place in America also, upon the same general lines which we have seen in
Schleiermacher and in Campbell. The typical figure here, the protagonist
of the movement, is William Ellery Channing. It may be doubted whether
there has ever been a civilisation more completely controlled by its
Church and ministers, or a culture more entirely dominated by theology,
than were those of New England until the middle of the eighteenth
century. There had been indeed a marked decline in religious life. The
history of the Great Awakening shows that. Remonstrances against the
Great Awakening show also how men's minds were moving away from the
theory of the universe which the theology of that movement implied. One
cannot say that in the preaching of Hopkins there is an appreciable
relaxation of the Edwardsian scheme. Interestingly enough, it was in
Newport that Channing was born and with Hopkins that he associated until
the time of his licensure to preach in 1802. Many thought that Channing
would stand with the most stringent of the orthodox. Deism and
rationalism had made themselves felt in America after the Revolution.
Channing, during his years in Harvard College, can hardly have failed to
come into contact with the criticism of religion from this side. There
is no such clear influence of current rationalism upon Channing as, for
example, upon Schleiermacher. Yet here in the West, which most Europeans
thought of as a wilderness, circumstances brought about the launching of
this man upon the career of a liberal religious thinker, when as yet
Schleiermacher had hardly advanced beyond the position of the
_Discourses_, when Erskine had not yet written a line and Campbell was
still a child. Channing became minister of the Federal Street Church in
Boston in 1803. The appointment of Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity
in Harvard College took place in 1805. That appointment was the first
clear indication of the liberal party's strength. Channing's Baltimore
Address was delivered in 1819. He died in 1847.