Scripture, Creed, Theology: Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine in the First Centuries

By Robert L. Calhoun

In this long-awaited edition of the late Robert Lowry Calhoun's lectures on the history of Christian doctrine, a powerful case is made for the scriptural basis of the ancient ecumenical creeds. The way Calhoun reads the patristic authors helps us see that the Trinitarian "three-yet-one" and Christological "two-yet-one" creedal formulations provide patterns for sorting out the highly diverse biblical ways of speaking of God and of the Messiah (Jesus) so that they are not contradictory. The implied lesson (all the more effective for many of Calhoun's students, just because he let them draw this conclusion by themselves) is that the creeds are not to be understood as deductions from scripture (which they are not in any straightforward way) but as templates for interpreting scripture. It is Trinitarian and Christological patterns of reading--which are implicitly operative for vast multitudes even in churches that profess to be creedless--that make it possible to treat the entire bible, Old and New Testaments together, as a unified and coherently authoritative whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781621890379

Robert L. Calhoun

Robert L. Calhoun (1896-1963) was Sterling Professor of Historical Theology at Yale Divinity School. He taught at Yale from 1923 until his retirement in 1965. Among his well-known colleagues and students were Roland Bainton, Hans Frei, Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert Wilken, Stanley Hauerwas, James Gustafson, and George Lindbeck.

Book preview

Abbreviations

Introduction:

Calhoun as Historical Theologian

By George A. Lindbeck

It has been a half-century or more since the Yale professor Robert Lowry Calhoun, yielding to the urgings of colleagues, friends, students, and publishers, agreed to prepare his Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine for publication. Now, more than four decades after his retirement in 1965 and a quarter century since his death in 1983 at the age of eighty-six, this agreement is fulfilled for the half of these lectures that cover the period from the New Testament to the eve of the Middle Ages. The importance of these seven centuries for the later history of Christian doctrine down to the present and the reasons Calhoun never got beyond them in his preparatory work are described in the last section of this introduction.

The first two sections sketch his towering reputation and considerable influence during his teaching career. Both his reputation and his influence were almost entirely the product of orally delivered lectures that he never published and that nevertheless significantly affected mainline Protestant theology and practice in ways that historians of American religious thought have heretofore overlooked. The third section, by far the longest, examines the sources of the unusual theological appeal of his Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine in their original setting; and the fourth suggests reasons for thinking that they are abundantly worth reading even today. The fifth and last section deals with, in addition to what has already been mentioned, the procedures followed in preparing the lectures in this book for publication.

A Forgotten Reputation

Calhoun’s reputation was immense but ephemeral. It grew from his teaching and other undocumented activities and scarcely at all from his writings. As is not unusual in such cases, even his name is now often unknown to Yale Divinity School faculty of the younger generation—not to mention their students—and few if any are aware that he taught ministerial, doctoral, and college students at Yale for close to a record length of time, from 1923 until he retired in 1965. In his own day, in contrast, he was famous far and wide. Reports of his preternatural brilliance began penetrating the hinterland from the early 1930s onward; I heard them almost immediately upon entering a Midwestern college the year before Pearl Harbor. It was in the 1940s and 1950s, however, that Calhoun’s reputation reached its height. He was then customarily linked with H. Richard Niebuhr and Roland Bainton as one of the three giants who contributed most to making Yale Divinity School the major center at that time of university ministerial and theological studies in North America. (Union Seminary in New York was generally regarded as Yale’s only real rival, but Union was not an integral part of a university.)

Nor was Calhoun’s fame confined to those interested in religion. It was also stellar among undergraduate students of philosophy, as scarcely anyone still active in the University now remembers. As was true elsewhere, it was Calhoun’s lecturing in particular that made him a legendary reputation in Yale College. For more than a quarter century he taught a yearlong survey of the history of philosophy that regularly attracted a hundred or more undergraduates. Nor were only the young enthusiastic. There were those in the university faculty at large who credited not only his undergraduate but also his graduate teaching—especially his Plato seminar—for contributing substantially to the revival of philosophy at Yale that began in the thirties. Yet the history of philosophy survey was the one most famous for its difficulty. Calhoun called it an advanced introductory survey; and in addition to the undergraduates, PhD students who sat for a doctoral examination in the field automatically took it even when they had had what was elsewhere considered good undergraduate preparation. One of these, Virginia Corwin, who did her dissertation under Calhoun and was head of the religion department at Smith until her retirement, tells of the time the undergraduate final was exactly the same as the PhD qualifying examination in the history of philosophy. The undergraduates, to be sure, were graded more leniently; yet only the brightest and best survived—as I know from being a teaching assistant for Calhoun in that same course rather more than a decade later. In retrospect, I find myself dumbfounded that he was able to attract so many from the college into what for most was a murderously difficult course.

The impression Calhoun made on many of us did not fade as we grew older. Like others who have had a chance to sample great teaching throughout the world, I think of him as the greatest lecturer I have either heard or heard of. He was simultaneously both enthralling and intellectually demanding, not only occasionally but for three hours a week in yearlong courses that went for a full thirty weeks. Furthermore, it was possible to sit in on the same course year after year without being bored, for his was a questioning mind: he regularly found fresh ways of reading and explaining the texts that he dealt with. Albert Outler, who studied and taught at Yale before his long and distinguished career at Perkins School of Theology of Southern Methodist University, sat through the history of doctrine course twice while he was a graduate student and once after joining the YDS faculty. Calhoun lectured steadily and without notes, yet in such a way that one thought of him as thinking through every sentence and paragraph as he spoke. Nevertheless, when transcribed word for word, those sentences and paragraphs—indeed, whole lectures—read as if they had been polished for publication. Let me borrow from Virginia Corwin once again, this time a quotation:

No student who has become a teacher can remember [Calhoun’s lectures] without a stab of envy. . . . The thought of someone gone centuries ago—St. Augustine, for example, or Origen—takes shape before the mind, every essential detail in place . . . the line and structure of the whole dominate, and the part is held in true proportion. . . . This extraordinary effect of clarity is not achieved by sacrificing a [thinker] or his conceptions to a scheme of one’s own. . . . Students know that they are watching a master teacher who is also an austerely honest historian, testing the theses of other scholars by reading the sources in their original language, by controlling the less well-known writings and personal letters, and making his independent report. He protests that he knows but little of the domain he traverses, but the listener is not deceived.

. . . The response can only be one of keen pleasure.

¹

It was not only Calhoun’s lectures, however, that made him a great teacher. An ill-defined question thrust into a lecture is treated with kindness beyond its deserts, rephrased and presented at its best before it is answered respectfully.² Or, to cite a complaint from Roland Bainton: [Calhoun] is equally self-giving to all inquirers. He will do anything for someone in front of him, though he finds it hard to work for the general public or posterity. A student, after a class ending at ten o’clock, would come with a question. Bob would discuss it with him until noon, take him to lunch and bring him back for further elucidation into the middle of the afternoon. Some of us have wished that he might do for the masses what he does for the man, but if Bob thinks about it he would probably answer that he leaves it to the man to minister to the masses. [He] teaches our generation largely through those whom he has taught.

³

Yet Calhoun’s reputation, great though it once was, is now rarely mentioned. Even those of us who are most heavily indebted to him rarely have occasion or opportunity to acknowledge our debts. We aren’t asked how he has influenced us; and when we try to document our borrowings from him, we are baffled. In part this silence is because of the difficulty of footnoting oral communications; but Calhoun also had the disconcerting habit whenever he was asked of citing a half-dozen or so sources for every idea we thought was original with him. Perhaps he had too good a memory, and that is why he had virtually no specialized scholarship to his credit despite his prodigiously broad and by no means shallow learning.⁴ Most scholarly books, he would tell us, are redundant because in their search for originality, they ignore or forget so much of what is already known that they lose perspective and balance. Not surprisingly, he thought of the classroom as the main locus of his job of transmitting the heritage and instilling a proper sense of what constitutes responsible scholarship. Such a legacy, however, although of central importance in the educational process, is bound to be largely anonymous; it resists public display and goes largely unrecorded.

Another now largely forgotten dimension of Calhoun’s reputation was national and international. He was active in the Federal and its successor the National Council of Churches as well as in the World Council as a theological consultant, a giver of addresses, and a drafter of major reports. Some say he was better able than other theologians to explain Americans to Europeans. Even Karl Barth, whom he respected but for the most part did not agree with, is reported to have been impressed by his knowledge of patristic sources—more recent theology appears not to have entered into their discussions.⁵ I, like others who studied under him, was only vaguely aware of his extramural fame at the time it was at its height in the 1940s and 1950s when I was his student, and I have done little to investigate it since. All I know is that I long kept meeting people before my retirement both here and abroad for whom Calhoun was a notable figure—not because they had ever met, heard, or read him, but simply because of his reputation.

Past Influence

Calhoun’s reputation as a teacher and lecturer accounts for the eagerness with which the publication of his Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine was once awaited. According to the rumors—undocumented as far as I know—that circulated at Yale, publishers competed to get their hands on the Lectures because they expected these would become a widely used textbook. The source of their eagerness, as could be expected, was Calhoun’s stellar reputation as a superb lecturer and excellent scholar whose difficult yearlong lecture course in the history of doctrine had became standard fare, not only for those enrolled in doctoral programs but also for ministerial candidates from what were then the dominant American Protestant denominations at what was widely regarded as the foremost divinity school in the country.

Some of the explanation for Calhoun’s appeal has already been quoted from Virginia Corwin. She emphasized the intellectually aesthetic awe and delight that came from hearing a great scholar and great lecturer put on an ever-changing but cumulative series of masterful performances day after day and week after week. These qualities would be attractive in our day also, but something more is needed to explain the special impression he made at midcentury. Perhaps it will help if I tell the story of one undergraduate in his history of philosophy course for which I was a teaching assistant in the late forties.

M.,⁶ as I shall call him, was a philosophy major, a professed atheist, and came from a semi-observant Jewish family. Calhoun was, he thought, the most brilliant human being he had ever encountered. More than that: Calhoun’s intellectual breadth, balance, and objectivity seemed stunning to this student. He did a more persuasive job of giving a synoptic overview of the thought of Plato and Aristotle, of Spinoza and Kant, not to mention other great philosophers, than they presumably could have done for themselves; and he did this not by bowdlerizing or translating into modern conceptualities, but in terms they themselves would have recognized as fair to what they were seeking to say. M. found himself first a Platonist, then an Aristotelian, later a Spinozist, and finally a Kantian (he never became a Hegelian, for although the course included Hegel, there were limits to Calhoun’s sympathies). At the end of the year, M. was left with one great question: what did Calhoun himself believe? As a Congregationalist clergyman, this great professor was assumed to be a theist of some sort, but of what kind and for what reasons? M. decided that the way to find out was to enroll at the Divinity School, which he proceeded to do for a year after he completed his BA. It was an enjoyable year, he later told me, not least because he never felt excluded, as had happened not infrequently while he was in Yale College. And Calhoun, the believer, was in evidence in the chapel talks he gave from time to time, as did all members of the YDS faculty.

Most significantly for M., the Divinity School helped to reconnect him with his Jewish roots. He left Yale and went on to write his PhD dissertation on Martin Buber and teach until his retirement from a major university. Throughout his life, however, Calhoun remained an enigma to him. He was baffled by Calhoun’s ability to engage such a student as himself in a personally meaningful search for the truth and yet be so objective that scarcely any hint of his theistic and Christian commitments appeared in his philosophy course. Or, at the Divinity School, how did he manage to be so evenhanded as not to offend such a Jew as himself and—this is my own addition—to be acceptable to everyone from Unitarians to Eastern Orthodox Christians including, perhaps most remarkably, the Protestant liberals, who were in the majority in the student body, and who thought of Calhoun as one of their own despite his for them puzzling respect for—among other things—the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds?

Part of the answer to this question is that Calhoun was so good an expositor that he didn’t need to be a controversialist; he didn’t need to intrude his own opinions or convictions in order to fascinate. Yet it must be added, I suppose, that impartiality and objectivity were more highly regarded in those days than in ours. The hermeneutics of suspicion had not yet received a name; and while two world wars and the irrationality of Nazism and Communism had already undermined the Enlightenment version of rationality, there was still a widespread belief that objectivity could be asymptotically approached, and that historians like Calhoun, who were both comprehensive and balanced and seemed to come closest to seeing things clearly and whole, were more reliable guides in the search for the truth than the ideologically biased advocates on the right or left. Yet Calhoun did not produce disciples. Perhaps one could say that his students never found out enough about what he believed or why he believed it to become his followers. Yet whatever their own convictions, whether staunchly secular or deeply religious, they tended to develop, as I earlier said, a Calhounian sense of intellectual responsibility; a belief that scholars are obligated to be respectful, fair, and indeed charitable in their understanding of others.

Yet in combination with his subject matter, Calhoun’s influence on attitudes did have consequences for theological orientation. Although he never directly discussed ecumenism in any of his history of doctrine classes as far as I know, he did mention the ecumenical importance of the study of historical theology in the only explicitly methodological essay on that subject he ever published.⁷ Four decades ago Robert Cushman, who was then the dean of Duke Divinity School, penned some lines that are in effect though not in form a personal confession of what happened to him when he was a student at YDS. Professor Calhoun’s distinctive contribution, he wrote, was to explore pre-modern deposits of philosophical and Christian wisdom at a time when theological studies in the American mainline denominations and the universities, not least at Yale, were heavily weighted on the side of sciences of religion and post-Kantian thought. No other single individual, Cushman implied, did more to open a way in the last century for sympathetic rediscovery of classical Christian positions both Catholic and Protestant. Calhoun thereby mightily helped doctrinally illiterate children of liberal American Christianity in the thirties and forties to recover a critical comprehension of the well-nigh unsearchable riches of inherited Christian wisdom. He not only prepared the ground for informed encounter with the neo-orthodox theology that liberal American religious thought was ill-prepared to receive, but also equipped American theologians (including Cushman) to enter into responsible discussion with their counterparts in the world ecumenical movement, and thus fulfill the role Providence [has assigned] as their theological and ecclesiastical vocation in the mid-twentieth century and, seemingly, for the foreseeable future.

⁸

The foreseeable future quickly arrives and then vanishes. Cushman wrote close to fifty years ago at the beginning of an outburst of ecumenical zeal and optimism that is now almost unimaginable even to those who lived through it. Vatican II together with the ecumenism represented by the World Council of Churches brought changes and opened dialogues that swept Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox into what seemed for a few years to be unstoppable advances toward church unity. Ressourcement, the return by divided Christians to the common sources of the faith, was chiefly responsible for whatever substance these advances had, but the enthusiasm that inflated their significance, vastly reinforced by mass-media sensationalism, came from the aggiornamento—the updating of the churches that would, so it was supposed, overcome the ancient and supposedly obsolete divisions of Christians from one another as well as from the modern world. Dean Cushman, as could be expected from a former student of Calhoun’s, focused on ressourcement, going so far as to hint in the above quotation that his teacher’s role in helping Protestants recover the well-nigh unsearchable riches of inherited Christian wisdom was providentially arranged. As I happen to have been one of those whose ecumenism benefited from Calhoun’s instruction, it would be ungrateful not to acknowledge the debt a good many of us owe to him for having given us a sympathetic, nonpartisan grounding in Christian doctrinal traditions as a whole. Nothing like it was available anywhere else in North America. Without his teaching, such Yale alumni as Albert Outler, my wife Violette Lindbeck, and I would have found our years in Rome at the Second Vatican Council much more bewildering and much less fruitful than they were. Historians who want to know the theological background of North American Protestant ecumenism during those heady years would benefit from consulting, among other things, this volume of Calhoun’s Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine.

Sources of Strength

It was not long, however, before that era ended. Theological concerns shifted radically in the time between 1965, when Calhoun retired, and the memorial service for him at Yale Divinity School in February 1984, a few months after his death. My own experience was not atypical: students who focused on doctrinally oriented ecumenism diminished to a trickle while those chiefly interested in topics of which I knew pitifully little, such as liberation theologies and death of God manifestoes, increased to a flood. This shift was naturally accompanied by a loss of enthusiasm for the sort of history of doctrine that Calhoun had practiced. Another kind of case than that advanced by Dean Cushman is needed to explain and support the present pertinence of Calhoun’s work.

Testimonies

Fortunately the two in memoriam speakers who are most important for our purposes, Professors Hans Frei and William Christian, were unswayed by these fluctuating fashions. Both had studied under Calhoun and were by this time generally thought of as Yale’s leading theologian and philosopher of religion respectively. Their memories of him centered on what they took to be his abiding strengths—which, if they were right, are as deserving of consideration now as when he was alive.

⁹

Hans Frei’s task was to explain Professor Calhoun’s role as an historian of doctrine (or, as he was officially titled, historical theologian). This was a difficult assignment. Ever since the Enlightenment, the history of Christian doctrine has been widely seen as a mixture of incompatibles, of fish and fowl, and hence illegitimate within a university setting. Traditionalists viewed the development of doctrine as ultimately guided by the Holy Spirit and thus requiring faith as well as reason for its investigation. For liberals, in contrast, doctrinal developments can be studied in a strictly historical fashion only insofar as they are accessible apart from faith. Calhoun belonged in neither of these two camps, for he sought to reconcile methodological liberalism more liberal than that of the liberals with doctrinal substance that was basically traditional. In contrast to theologically liberal historians and indeed to most people down to the present day, Calhoun did not think that the modern critical outlook is a liberal monopoly. It can be used in defense of tradition as well as against it, and also against liberalism no less than in its defense. Frei believed Calhoun was successful in his reconciliation of liberal method and traditional substance: What is so clear in retrospect is the distinctive harmony of liberalism and Christian traditionalism without detriment to either, in Professor Calhoun’s thinking.

¹⁰

Frei’s explanation of this thesis was brief, as befitted an in memoriam occasion, but it prompted much of the content of this introduction and needs to be recalled in detail. He began by noting that those of us, including himself, who had been Calhoun’s students from the late 1930s through the early 1960s had badly misunderstood him. We knew that so-called neo-orthodoxy had increasingly affected Yale along with other mainline Protestant seminaries during most of that period, and that Calhoun had become less liberal theologically though more liberal politically (as was generally true of those influenced by neo-orthodoxy). What was assumed to be evident, however, was that he remained theologically to the left not only of Karl Barth but also of the three very different figures who in those days were considered most representative of North American neo-orthodoxy: Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich of Union in New York City; and at Yale, Reinhold’s brother H. Richard Niebuhr, a colleague and close friend of Calhoun. That was enough to identify Calhoun as basically a liberal. Neo-orthodoxy had come to define orthodoxy, and we took disagreement with the former as proof of liberalism.

Frei told us that he had come to see that we had been deeply mistaken. While it was true that methodological liberalism was a major factor in Calhoun’s thinking, it was not this element that substantively separated him from the neo-orthodox as well as from liberals in general. Rather, as has already been mentioned, it was Christian traditionalism that did so. This recognition came as a jolt. Calhoun had often been labeled liberal, and he had done this himself, but he had never been called a traditionalist by either himself or others. Yet Frei showed us in a few tightly packed minutes that the evidence for his former teacher’s traditionalism pervaded his work. He also implied that much of what we had thought of as liberal because it was not neo-orthodox was in fact traditional, but few got the message despite abundant indications to that effect in what he said:

[Calhoun] taught us to use the time-honored orthodox term doctrine once again with ease, and not even to be afraid of the word dogma. In his lectures . . . orthodoxy was a matter of broad consensus within a growing and living tradition with wide and inclusive perimeters. His theological teaching was above all generous, confident that divine grace and human reflection belonged together and that the revelation of God in Christ was no stranger to this world, for the universe was providentially led, and human history was never, even in the instances of the greatest follies, completely devoid of the reflection of the divine light. And therefore church and world, the Christian community and the broad, infinitely varied life of culture belonged naturally together. Music, poetry, sports, the day’s work in the shop, on the farm or in the study—none of it is foreign to the service of the same God whose name is praised and exalted in the church. It was quite natural, then, for Calhoun . . . to be equally a part of the academic, yes, the increasingly secular academic community and to be fully a part of the church. . . . [His ecumenical] service was the practical companion piece to what, in the classroom, was a solid doctrine of the church which included liberal views but also the older Protestant heritage and, back of that, the Augustinian Civitas dei with its vision of a transcendent kingdom of tensed and always incomplete presence here on earth. . . .

[I]n his doctrine of God he was not at all averse to a philosophical and religious use of the traditional theistic proofs—ontological, cosmological, and teleological. How could that be? In large part because in his theory of knowledge he was a critical realist (in contrast to Richard Niebuhr’s critical idealism). The God we worship is not simply a transcendental subject, not simply the ground of our intuitions about God present in our responses to him. The God we worship is an overpoweringly real and objective majestic presence, the One beyond the many, who is at the same time Creator, Judge, and Redeemer. God is there in his own right, independent and prior to all that we say and do, and therefore rightly to be worshipped. . . . Critical realism in the doctrine of the knowledge of God served Calhoun in making the transition from liberalism, not to neo-orthodoxy, but to a view closer to traditional orthodoxy, without abandoning his liberal convictions. It was reflected in the doctrine of God and many others, and it provided a common ground for knowledge of the real God in nature and in revelation.

. . . We talk today of the distinctiveness of religious or Christian language use. Calhoun didn’t use those terms, but he would have understood them and understood in a richer way than we often do. He knew full well that the pattern of ancient philosophical thought, chiefly Hellenic and Hellenistic, and then the whole course of the history of Western philosophy has its own integrity and autonomy, apart from the roles it has had in Christian thought. But more than many others he also showed that philosophy found a home in the history of Christian doctrine, and not to the detriment of the integrity of that history. In contrast to Adolph [sic] von Harnack as well as some conservative historians of doctrine, he believed that the Greeks were there right from the inception of Christian thought, and that they and their philosophical successors were fitly there. They contributed to the construction of the building. He would have agreed with Schleiermacher that Christianity, when freed from unwarranted fears of secular thought and from a hopeless passion for ideal linguistic purity, has right from the beginning been a language-shaping force and not a shapeless receptacle for every bit of new vocabulary that needs purification from time to time. [Instead of this,] Calhoun went about the business of showing how the one great, continuing tradition was built with the aid of . . . countless cultural contributions then and now.

What he did, then, was to hand on to his students in the pulpit as well as in the classroom the vision of a living, integral and open-ended Christian tradition, a strong tradition. He is a powerful link in a long, unbroken pedagogic chain, an unforgettable example to those of us who follow after him with gratitude.

¹¹

Frei singled out in these concluding remarks those aspects of Calhoun’s work that provide much help to those in large part unfamiliar even at second hand with Calhoun’s vision of the two-thousand-year history of Christian thought. Frei delivered his only as-yet-unquoted reference earlier in his talk well before the last paragraph, even though it was of climactic importance. It reads as if it were a blurb for the present volume written a quarter century ahead of time, for the case in favor of Calhoun’s historical vision may be as strong or stronger now than it was in 1984.

Looking over his great Lectures in [sic] the History of Christian Doctrine, the publication of which is finally in preparation, one rediscovers the marvelously panoramic setting which served as the chrysalis of his generous, liberal orthodoxy.

¹²

Frei himself can be regarded as both heir and transposer of Calhoun’s historical vision. He was closer theologically to Calhoun than to his primary academic mentor, H. Richard Niebuhr, and it is further remembered that he talked at times as if Calhoun’s example had in important ways correctively balanced Barth’s impact. It has even been suggested that after Barth, Calhoun was the Christian thinker who had most influenced him. It is difficult to know how much to trust undocumented memories,¹³ but these points are consistent with the in memoriam remarks we have considered. In part because of this, it makes sense (even if one disregards undocumented memories) to see Frei’s contribution to the theological understanding of Christian faith in the present situation as an extension into modern times of the combination of liberalism and traditionalism characteristic of Calhoun’s contribution to the historical understanding of that same faith in premodern settings.

Such has been said for the purposes of an introduction to indicate what was unique in Calhoun’s history of Christian doctrine that made it into the cradle or chrysalis of an orthodoxy that was also generous and liberal. He was among those who turned away from prewar liberalism after World War I; but unlike the others, he moved not to neo-orthodoxy but to a view closer to traditional orthodoxy without abandoning his liberal convictions.¹⁴ He came to recognize through his historical work that traditionalisms and not only liberalisms can be generous (as well as ungenerous) in their interactions with one another and with the world at large. Thus Calhoun agreed with [the liberal] Schleiermacher that Christianity has right from the beginning been a ‘language-shaping’ force, and disagreed with the later and, in his day, supremely influential liberal historical theologian, von Harnack, for whom Christianity had been a shapeless receptacle for every bit of new vocabulary from which it needs to be purged from time to time.¹⁵ In opposition both to Harnackian liberal versions of the Reformation sola Scriptura as well to modern conservative ones, Calhoun went about the business of showing how the one great, continuing tradition was built with the aid of . . . countless cultural contributions then and now. It was this, to repeat, that enabled him to hand on to his students . . . the vision of a living, integral and open-ended Christian tradition¹⁶ that was liberal in its inclusiveness and, as also needs to be emphasized, traditional in its undergirding: "[W]ithin a growing and living tradition with wide and inclusive perimeters

. . . orthodoxy was a matter of a wide consensus."

¹⁷

A second and shorter memorial talk, this one by Professor Christian, dealt with Calhoun’s work from a philosophical perspective, though not without appreciation for his work on doctrine. After explaining that his outrageous expectations surprised [his students] into doing better than their best for he really thought we knew more than we did,¹⁸ Christian spoke of a Plato seminar in which Calhoun yielded to the pleading of his students and shared with them why he was philosophically a sort of Platonist (although of an unfamiliar kind). He argued, to us very impressively, that more sense could be made of the methods of modern science on Plato’s principles than Aristotle’s or Kant’s.¹⁹ The lesson above all that he learned was this:

There have been philosophers who have thought that the value of the history of philosophy is only that it tells us the mistakes of the past. But [Calhoun] was not one of them. He thought that some philosophers who lived in bygone ages should be listened to with respect. Indeed on some points it might turn out that they were right.

At one point nearly forty years ago [the late 1940s] he had been in Chicago as a visiting professor. I asked him what he thought of it. He said with an air of surprise and puzzlement, Those people don’t know the Enlightenment is over. . . . The point was that the Enlightenment had happened, and a good thing too. But much had happened since then, and much had happened before that. The long conversation that has been going on since Thales should not, in its admissions policy so to speak, restrict its participants to those of a certain epoch and, perhaps, particularly not to those of the Enlightenment. One might say that he was an enlightened man, but not a man of the Enlightenment. He lived, and taught, by a different light.

²⁰

Others were waiting to speak; and there was no time to describe the puzzlingly different light by which Professor Calhoun lived, and taught. Yet something must be said about this light that led him both to agree with the general belief that it was a good thing . . . the Enlightenment had happened even while he also held, in opposition to widespread scholarly opinion, that this era was now out of date. This was true not only in such areas as mathematics and the natural sciences; the new methods of critical inquiry initiated by Kant’s three Critiques could be helpfully (as well as unhelpfully) employed in philosophy and theology also. What had been disastrous were not the new insights but the blindly dismissive attitude toward much that was best in premodern thought. A. O. Lovejoy, whom Calhoun rated more highly than any other historian of ideas, diagnosed the basic problem this way:

Assuming human nature to be a simple thing, the Enlightenment also, as a rule, assumed political and social problems to be simple, and therefore easy of solution. Rid man’s mind of a few ancient errors, purge his beliefs of the artificial complications of metaphysical systems and theological dogmas, restore to his social relations something like the simplicity of the state of nature, and his natural excellence would, it was assumed, be realized, and mankind would live happily ever after.

²¹

Liberal or Traditionalist?

The methodological dependence of theology on the Enlightenment that Calhoun deplored was more widespread than he seemed to think. Those beginning their studies in places like Yale Divinity School generally came from liberal churches or colleges and were habituated to taking as authoritative such sources as the Encyclopedia Britannica treatment of Liberalism, Theological in the edition current both long before and well after Calhoun’s retirement. According to this entry, theological liberalism is a form of religious thought that establishes religious inquiry on the basis of a norm other than the authority of tradition.²² The alternative basic norm may be reason, as it was for Kant, or religious experience understood with the help of Kant’s critical analysis of reason, as it was for Schleiermacher, but it was generally assumed in both cases that that the results would be contrary to tradition. Liberal methods were counted on to support liberal conclusions, and the reverse was expected of traditional methods. That is why theological conservatives were warned against attending places like Yale, and why liberals ignored conservative scholars on the grounds that they already knew the latter’s methodological mistakes.

Calhoun’s perspective was distinctly different from this generally accepted view, for he did not regard critical thinking whether Kantian or Schleiermacherian as necessarily anti-traditional:

Toward the end of the 18th century, a new theological method and temper came into being. . . . [To it] Kant affixed the label critical, and that term continues to serve better than any other to identify the essential difference between newer and older theologies, whether affirming or dissenting from traditional norms . . .

[T]hinkers as diverse as Schleiermacher and Ritschl, on the one hand, Kierkegaard and Barth, on the other, display the characteristic effects of Kant’s fresh analysis of the grounds and limits of human knowledge . . . [L]iberalism, romantic or moralistic, and dialectical neo-orthodoxy are modes of thought essentially different from both patristic, scholastic, or confessional theologies, and from the pre-Kantian rationalisms of all kinds. A full examination of the newer modes of theology would . . . [bring] the story down to the present decade. But here we must content ourselves with a glance at the new critical principle as Kant began its formulation, and at the first . . . full-scale system of liberal Protestant dogmatic [viz., Schleiermacher’s theology] in which the principle has been applied.

²³

There were both advantages and disadvantages in thus ending the course in history of doctrine with Kant and Schleiermacher. It was with them more than anyone else that the methodological shift from old to new ways of doing theology took place. So great were the changes they wrought that all major later developments were classified at Yale as Contemporary Theology and assigned to teachers other than Calhoun. The final factor contributing to his reticence was this curricular division that barred the history of doctrine (also known as historical theology) from covering the period after around 1800 (which period, not coincidentally, was the heyday of liberalism). Developments after this date except for Roman Catholic trends through 1870 were classified as contemporary rather than historical and were the province of systematic and dogmatic theology—which functioned as two names for the same discipline.

Most people thought Calhoun’s resistance to transgressing disciplinary boundaries (which applied not only to theology but also to such other cognate areas as scriptural studies) was excessive, and complaints were not unknown. Dissertation writers dealing with newer modes of theology murmured sotto voce that even when he clearly knew more about a thesis topic than anyone else and was endlessly helpful in unofficial ways, he refused to act as director. He did this for what to them was the implausible reason that he was not an expert in the field. His faculty colleagues, on the other hand, were not surprised: they agreed with the complainers that his ability to read quickly, broadly, and at the same time retentively was unparalleled, but they also knew of his insistence that the task of bringing the story down to the present decade belonged to dogmaticians and systematicians and not to him.

²⁴

In accordance with this rule, he ended his history of doctrine with a lecture on Schleiermacher,²⁵ whose life straddled 1800, and whom he like many others regarded as the initiator and the architect of what can be conveniently described as mediating liberalism—though he generally called it simply liberalism. Its seeming solution to the problem of reconciling liberalism and Christian traditionalism helped to make it far more popular in religious circles; and for that reason, it was a far greater challenge to Christian traditionalism than purebred Enlightenment liberalism had ever been. From its beginnings until the Great War of 1914–1918, mediating liberalism dominated the theological avant garde of Protestantism and remained strong on the grassroots level for decades afterward—not to mention the persistence of its influence in new forms down to the present. Nothing that happened after its beginnings, however, fell within Calhoun’s teaching area, and we are chiefly dependent on what he had to say about Schleiermacher for his understanding of later developments. It was Schleiermacher’s view of the job of the theologian [that] . . . has come to be associated with liberal Protestant thought.

²⁶

In Calhoun’s discussions of Schleiermacher, he seemed to take for granted that we knew that a key axiom of liberal anti-traditionalism rested on the fallacy of denying the antecedent.²⁷ Fortunately for students who had never taken a course in logic, Calhoun’s way of teaching the history of doctrine taught them to recognize this fallacy even when they didn’t know its technical name. His way of plotting the story of doctrinal development provided plenty of evidence that there are often good reasons for traditional beliefs that are quite different from the discredited ones that had once been persuasive. Thinking otherwise came to seem in student bull sessions as I remember them no less silly than doubting the traditional belief, old as the race, that the sun will continue to rise and set as long as sun and earth endure just because the ancients falsely supposed that the rising and setting resulted from the sun’s rotation around the earth rather than the earth’s rotation on its axis. This astronomical example was too simplistic an analogy for Calhoun to use, but we were more simpleminded than he was.

It should not be supposed, however, that Mr. Calhoun had no help in resisting anti-traditionalism. Those enrolled for divinity degrees were not eligible to take his courses until their second year; and by that time, from the 1930s on, they had been assured by their fellows (especially those who took courses from H. Richard Niebuhr, a recent addition to the faculty) that liberalism in general was out of date. The future belonged to the dialectical or crisis theologies from Europe that came to be called neo-orthodox in their American versions. For this rapidly strengthening avant garde, the truly dangerous liberalism was not that of the original Enlightenment that had rejected the Christian doctrinal heritage as a whole, but the mediating variety that sought to reconcile tradition and modernity and in the process perverted what it retained. It was the latter that was far and away the more popular and powerful. It dominated mainline Protestantism intellectually even if not numerically throughout the world from the late nineteenth century until at least the Great War of 1914, and its influence remained strong in North America long after that.

As mentioned earlier, Calhoun, like others, traced the beginnings of what were still in his day the dominant forms of mediating liberalism to Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834).²⁸ This great German theologian sought to reconcile traditionally Pietist forms of Christian experience with what Calhoun, in agreement with almost every competent judge of the matter including Karl Barth, regarded as an intellectually and in some respects, experientially impressive conjoining of the Kantian Enlightenment with late eighteenth-century Romanticism. Whatever one thinks of the original character of this mediating liberalism (of which more later), its offshoots had become enmeshed well before 1900 in what Calhoun viewed as a Western culture in which earlier Enlightenment optimism had been reshaped and intensified by the unscientific misuse of Darwinism in the work of such philosophers as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Here is some of what his students heard about the consequences in 1947:

[These thinkers] enshrined the struggle for existence and the mechanisms of natural selection among the basic principles of the world we live in . . . [The ethic] of the secular way of life . . . was the quest for success, measured especially in terms of possessions and power. To this end [paradoxically], a whole gamut of virtues [of which Christians approve] was called for: industry, sobriety, thrift, and many more. Its cult was imperialistic nationalism replete with ritual, emotional appeal, and a genuine call for self-devotion [for self-sacrifice on behalf of the nation]. . . . The mode of thought which served as a kind of theology for this secular religion was evolutionary naturalism. . . . Evolution was king, and all would be well.

The outcome in 1914 and thereafter has been a harsh judgment on such naïve optimism. First came war. . . . Then came depression. . . . War and depression combined to spawn more virulent forms of neo-paganism. Thence came World War II, ending in universal [nuclear] dread. . . . For this unhappy crisis much of so-called Christianity must of course share the blame.

²⁹

Calhoun did not exempt conservative Christians from blame, but his audience knew that it was mostly liberal Christianity he had in mind. It was this that was the chief provider of religious reinforcement to the naïve optimism that was at the heart of the debacle. It was liberal Christians who had taken the lead in minimizing the sinfulness of human beings and maximizing their ability to perfect themselves and their society and thus usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. Moreover, the liberals did this in a period when the mainline Protestant churches in which they were dominant were generally regarded as immensely influential in three leading world powers: Britain, Germany, and the United States. Calhoun was only belatedly disenchanted with this liberalism that did not come under attack in America until well after World War I. In the 1930s, however, he finally wrote of the disastrous consequences of the replacement of faith in God by faith in cultural progress in all forms of liberalism and of the ‘social gospel’ within the churches which identify the Kingdom of God with a cultural ideal or an improved social order.

³⁰

As student memories faded of the character and consequences of Protestant liberalism’s captivity to the culture of the prewar period, Calhoun decided after his retirement not to publish the bulk of what he had said on these topics. The major exception he made concerned the effects of that culture on biblical interpretation as manifest, for example, in the tendency, prevalent at the turn of the century, to find in the gospels the story of a modern-minded religious leader.³¹ This exception sharpens the question to be next addressed as to why his students thought of him as liberal even though those outside Yale classified him as neo-orthodox.

³²

Calhoun as a Liberal

Hans Frei suggested in his in memoriam remarks, it will be recalled, that Calhoun’s traditionalism had resemblances to liberalism that made him seem more liberal than the neo-orthodox (including his friend and colleague, H. Richard Niebuhr), but that this same traditionalism made him closer to traditional orthodoxy than were the neo-orthodox. The first lecture in this volume provides some of the support for this analysis: Before entering into detail, it will be well to remind ourselves of different ways of envisioning the theological enterprise in relation to God’s revelatory activity, on the one hand, and human religious experience, on the other.³³ There are three such ways—liberal, neo-orthodox, and traditional—and while Calhoun does not expressly say as much, his traditional way brackets neo-orthodoxy on both left and right: it is both more liberal and more orthodox than the latter. In outlining the differences and similarities between liberal experiential and traditional revelational positions, he made Schleiermacher the paradigmatic representative of liberalism:

It seemed to him that religion as the rationalists of the eighteenth century had understood and attacked it, was misconceived. They had tried to identify it with a particular set of doctrines or with a particular set of morals, pronouncements of the intellect or guidelines for the will. . . . [He] undertook to defend the validity of theology upon a new ground by urging that its task is the elaboration of the content of religious experience.³⁴ The emphasis now is not upon an objective act of God but upon the personal experience of human beings. Schleiermacher had no intention at any time of denying the presence and activity of God; that was an indispensable presupposition. But it seemed to him that all one could know of God, and all that one could intelligently talk about as a theologian was what happened in God’s presence . . . . And so theology is concerned in the first instance not with revelation, but rather with religion. . . .

I myself am inclined to welcome especially the reaction of those who say revelation is the chief concern of the theologian: God, but God speaking to man, God as he is known to human beings in his presence, judgment, and mercy. It seems to me that the primary emphasis must be placed where the traditional view placed it: upon the impact of God on man. At the same time Schleiermacher’s insights simply cannot be brushed aside. . . . [T]he human response to that impact familiarly called religious experience, is inseparable from the account of God’s self-revelation.

³⁵

One of the reasons that it was easy to think of Calhoun as liberal was that intentionally or not, he made Schleiermacher’s view of theology seem more attractive than was the traditional position that he said was his own. As Calhoun indicated more fully elsewhere than in the present volume, Schleiermacher’s stress on religious experience appealed first of all to the religiously and romantically inclined for whom eighteenth-century rationalism was affectively barren; second, to the modern-minded for whom experientialism’s presumed independence of tradition warranted making it an authoritative basis for theology (or religious inquiry, as the Britannica article put it); and third, to the devotees of the Enlightenment for whom religious experience when independent of tradition was a permissible foundation provided that modern critical reason was treated as a coequal authority. In the long run, however, the greatest of all attractions was the compatibility, according to Schleiermacher and his followers, of cherished Christian traditions with religious experience.

The Christian shares in the religiousness common to all human beings. . . . [He] knows, however, two further moments: he is not only creature, but is also sinner. . . . Yet he is not only sinner, he is also aware of salvation through Jesus Christ. He doesn’t know himself as sinner until he has been saved. . . . Now Jesus Christ becomes for him redeemer because he, first and alone of humankind, had perfect God-consciousness. . . . made accessible to those who associate themselves with him in faith, as a community.

³⁶

Everything in this summary is reconcilable with the church’s historic faith. To be sure, some central doctrines are not included, most notably the Trinitarian ones, but these are not rejected.³⁷ The first sentence would have troubled Barth, for whom [r]eligion is declared to be of man’s making: it is human, all too human, and is in no sense God’s self-revelation,³⁸ but the Barthian view of religion and religious experience was for Calhoun an unfortunate modern reaction against liberalism. The so-called dialectical position was untraditional as well as illiberal, opposed to the scripturally defensible (though not explicitly stated) view that religiousness, even though susceptible to demonic distortions, originates initially in response to the general revelation referred to in such texts as the heavens declare the glory of God (Ps 19:1), and what can be known about God is plain [also to those ‘who suppress the truth’] . . . in the things that have been made (Rom 1:19–20). Equally without warrant are objections to such concepts as God-consciousness on the grounds that they are untraditional, for untraditionality was also characteristic of much of the conceptuality of the ancient creeds at the time they were formulated. Neither could traditionalists protest against the two further moments, sin and salvation, nor against the affirmation that Jesus Christ, first and alone of humankind, had perfect consciousness of God. More objections to these clauses would have come from Calhoun’s liberal students, for they were in the majority, than from the scattered minority of conservatives.³⁹ The most widespread disagreement would have been with the statement that a sinner doesn’t know himself as sinner until he has been saved, but that was a problem for Arminian conservatives just as much as for the few liberals who shared the Arminian dislike of the traces of Calvinistic Augustinianism in Schleiermacher’s work—a dislike Calhoun did not share.

Here then was an apparently successful reconciliation of liberalism with traditionalism, of anti-traditional experientialism with traditional-sounding theological conclusions. Calhoun, it seemed, should have approved of this combination, and yet he disagreed. Moreover, he gave no reasons for holding that the liberal failure to treat religious experience as human response to God’s self-revelation disqualified it from serving as the basis of theology. This position was doubly puzzling in view of his approving references qua historian to the originally Lutheran Pietist reaction against the arid dogmatic theology of seventeenth-century Protestant scholasticism; to the Moravian revitalization of this Pietism; and to the fact that [t]hrough John Wesley in England and Friedrich Schleiermacher in Germany, this Moravian re-emphasis of ‘religion of the heart’ spread into wider and wider spheres of influence.⁴⁰ It sounded to his hearers as if he thought that while Trinitarianism when rightly understood and practiced was preferable to the unitarianism of the Second Person (to borrow a phrase from his colleague, H. Richard Niebuhr) that characterized Schleiermacher’s version of christocentric, feeling-suffused piety, the latter was nevertheless better than the rationalistic Trinitarian orthodoxy that had come to be identified with Christian traditionalism in the eighteenth century.

Finally, in reference to scholarship, Calhoun reminded his classes that the study of religion, of the Bible, of Christianity, and of Christianity’s relation to other religions benefited greatly from the liberal emphasis on religious experience.⁴¹ His treatment of worship in this volume,⁴² for example, draws extensively on Rudolf Otto’s classic analysis of the experience of the numinous in Das Heilige (1917). Given all these commendable characteristics, even conservatives (or evangelicals, as they probably would now be called) found themselves wondering whether religious experience of the right kind wasn’t a better grounding for theology than the revelational objectivity their teacher favored. And he, with his passion for getting students to make up their own minds, seemed satisfied with this outcome.

Calhoun’s resistance to anyone’s becoming his disciple seems almost ludicrous in retrospect, though that is not the way it was experienced. After his semester-long seminar on Schleiermacher (which he gave every year or two), students were uncertain whether he thought the latter’s masterpiece, The Christian Faith, "was the most important work of Reformed theology since the Institutes . . . [or] the most destructive aberration from the Reformed theological tradition to which the contemporary Christian mind has been made victim. All they were sure of was that he thought that [b]oth judgments can find strong reasons."⁴³ When pleas to resolve such uncertainties were especially urgent, he responded on occasion that he was an historian and not a theologian.⁴⁴ Officially this was true and also, to repeat, he did tend to overestimate us. Yet what we chiefly understood him to be saying was that we should make up our own minds. He was acutely aware that we were much too likely to be swayed by his opinions just because they were his and not because of their intrinsic worth. He was also probably not unaware that his uncommunicativeness about his own convictions enhanced his reputation for objectivity; and this reputation in turn made understandable why those who knew or suspected that they radically disagreed with him trusted his reliability as an historian as fully as did the rest of us.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that these factors were the only reason for Calhoun’s favorable treatment of the liberalism with which he disagreed. He was also motivated, some of his students came to suspect, by the indiscriminateness of the neo-orthodox reaction against prewar liberalism. Dialectical theologians tended to lump together Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith, for example, with the insanely optimistic and complacent Kulturprotestantismus, as the Germans termed it, that dominated much of the Protestant establishment in America as well as elsewhere before World War I. Schleiermacher could not be blamed for this later development, as Calhoun thought Barth was inclined to do—a complaint that Calhoun modified when Barth’s view of Schleiermacher became more nuanced.⁴⁵ This lack of discrimination (in which Emil Brunner was a worse offender than Barth) created a climate so unfavorable to Schleiermacher’s version of liberalism that students were unlikely to develop enduring attachments to it no matter how appealing their teacher made it seem. The message that most of them thought they heard was that uncritical rejection of liberalism was to be resisted just as much as uncritical acceptance of neo-orthodoxy; and this evenhandedness, they were accustomed to thinking, was a mark of liberalism rather than traditionalism.

In addition to Calhoun’s evenhanded treatment of such controversial figures as Schleiermacher, it was often difficult for his students even to guess what he personally believed from his teaching. He would persuade students that Athanasius out-argued the Arians and that the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds were more successful than any alternatives in formulating internally consistent and comprehensively applicable guidelines for interpreting the many very different biblical references to the issues with which they dealt. This persuasiveness, however, would not resolve their uncertainties as to whether he was himself a Trinitarian or a Unitarian, or whether he personally believed that Jesus Christ incarnate is a single and indivisible person who is both fully God and fully human. Their questions on such matters might have been answered if they listened to his chapel talks or came to know such addresses as the one he delivered at the Oberlin Faith and Order Conference in 1957 on Christ and the Church.⁴⁶ In the absence of data like this, however, it was possible to think of him as an excellent scholar who was superbly fair in communicating what he knew, whether favorable or unfavorable, about the teachings of a religion that, for all one could tell, was not his own. Even some of the not inconsiderable number of students who were indebted to him for helping them to settle their doubts about the biblical basis of the early creeds continued to think of him as a liberal such as they no longer were. Why else would he be so reticent about his own theology, and so averse to telling even those who asked his guidance what they should believe? Creedlessness and liberalism, after all, often go hand in hand.

Methodological Agnosticism

Historical studies were for Calhoun a this-worldly enterprise with a perspective limited to empirical aspects of reality. Not that he ignored the actions of the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in creating, saving, and guiding the world and all that is within it. Nevertheless, it was the incontestably this-worldly actuality of belief in the realities affirmed by faith that was historically relevant, not the truth or falsity of what was believed. Concern about the truth or falsehood was the business of such other disciplines as theology. This position of Calhoun’s that history (as well as other empirical disciplines in the soft and hard sciences) should be methodologically agnostic was rare during his teaching career but began to be expressed by the time he retired. Calhoun, however, was not one to refer students to his own writings, and few ever read the comments on methodology in his article on the role of historical theology. If they did, their impressions of his liberalism were likely to be reinforced.

Whereas the historian’s end term is always, in principle, some actual happening in time and space, within history,