Does the History of Theology Still Matter?

Abstract

Historians of American religion and culture who care about the history of ideas, especially the history of New England theology, feel a little bereft. Their colleagues seem to have deserted them to study visual culture, lived religion, gender, ritual, colonial encounter, sexuality, immigration, and diaspora and look glassy-eyed at the very mention of the New Divinity movement or the Unitarian controversy. In Protestant scholasticism, angels may not have danced on the heads of pins, but they might as well have. Of all the questions you might want to ask/ about angels, the only one you ever hear/ is how many can dance on a head of a pin, the poet Billy Collins writes. What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,/ their diet of unfiltered divine light? The politely muffled yawns seem to suggest that there have to be more interesting and material questions in American religious and cultural history than the fate of Calvinist metaphysics.' E. Brooks Holifield, at work on this history of Theology in America for much of his distinguished career, knows that the historiographical terrain has shifted under him and confesses as much at the outset: I have written this book during an era in which most students of American religion have turned their attention away from literate elites, the history of ideas, the abstractions of intellectuals, and the activities of leaders (p. viii). Gone are the days when the Protestant theological interests of Yale's Sydney Ahlstrom, Holifield's esteemed mentor, dominated this domain of inquiry. Gone are the days when even an iconoclastic soul like the University of Chicago's Sidney Mead cut his teeth in the field by doing an in-depth study of Nathaniel William Taylor and the New Haven Theology. Gone, too, are the days when Neoorthodoxy offered a credible intellectual framework for legitimating the recovery of New England Calvinism for believers and unbelievers alike (Joseph Haroutunian and Perry Miller come to mind). As Holifield's masterful work takes its place in this new terrain, it is worth asking the pointed and tendentious question: does the history of theology still matter in the study of American religion and culture?