On Cultivating a Transgressive Theological Imagination

Abstract

While doing archival research for my part of a book on the history of practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, I came across very disturbing evidence for a fundamental failure of theological imagination on the part of seminary faculty during the nineteenth century. On the vexed matters of slavery and race, every faculty member at PTS who taught anything about practical theology until nearly the end of the 1800s could not imagine a society in which African Americans and Euro-Americans could live together as equals. A rigid Westminster orthodoxy undergirded with Scottish Common Sense philosophy constrained their interpretation of Scripture as well as their theological imagination in very unfortunate ways. While they all agreed that slavery as an institution was a blight upon humanity, not one of them could or would condemn it outright because of the way they read several texts in the Pauline corpus (none of which explicitly condemned slavery). As a result, they believed and taught generations of future pastors that they should leave politics to the politicians, that slaves should be taught to read in order that they might be able to read Scripture as an aid to salvation, and that slave owners should be admonished to treat slaves humanely, and that freed slaves should be sent en masse to colonize Liberia. Their theological imagination, underdeveloped as it was, can be seen in the admonitions concerning Liberia. Sending freed slaves back to Africa would, so they thought, address multiple problems. It would solve the race problem in the United States by removing black slaves and former slaves from society. They also thought it would contribute greatly to the evangelism challenge of the Great Commission by having people of African descent—whom they argued were constitutionally more adapted to survival on the African continent than were Euro-American missionaries—preaching the gospel to Africans. Astonishingly, even as late as 1877 (14 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 12 years after the end of the Civil War) the one practical theologian on the seminary’s faculty still held to this line of thinking and articulated it before the American Colonization Society. Though there were voices like Marcus Theology Today 70(2) 105–108 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0040573613488311 ttj.sagepub.com