Abstract
Buckminster and Norton certainly stood near the liberal end of the theological spectrum in early-nineteenth-century America. It is not surprising that Unitarians departed from traditional conceptions and interpretations of the Bible. What is interesting is how elements of this evidentiary and historicist tendency pervaded the theological landscape beyond the liberal Unitarians. The belief that the Bible must be studied objectively, historically, and free from theological presuppositions can be found in conservative Moses Stuart (1780–1852) as well.
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Notes
See John Giltner, Moses Stuart: The Father of Biblical Science (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Giltner, “Moses Stuart and the Slavery Controversy: A Study in the Failure of Moderation,” Journal of Religious Thought 18, no. 1 (1961): 27–40; R. W. Yarbrough, “Moses Stuart,” in Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. Donald K. McKim (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1998), 368–72; Mark Granquist, “The Role of ‘Common Sense’ in the Hermeneutics of Moses Stuart,” Harvard Theological Review 83, no. 3 (1990): 305–19; and Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).
Stuart wrote that the “sale of the Rev. J. S. Buckminster’s library in Boston threw a considerable number of German critical works” for his consumption. Among the first Germans who influenced him, he notes “Seller, Storr, Flatt, [and] J. D. Michaelis.” Later, “Eichhorn, Gabler, Paulus, Staüdlin, Haenlein, Jahn, Rosenmüller (father and son), Gesenius, Planck, and others of like rank and character” influenced him. He also wrote, “I have, for the last twenty years, read much more in German authors (comprising their Latin as well as German productions), than I have in my own vernacular language; a matter not of choice, i.e. not out of any special partiality for the German, but one to me of necessity.” Christian Review 6, no. 23 (1841): 449–50.
Moses Stuart “Letters to the Editor, on the Study of the German Language,” Christian Review 6, no. 23 (1841): 450.
Stuart articulates his principles of biblical interpretation in a variety of places. For example, see Stuart, “Study of the German Language”; Stuart, “Are the Same Principles of Interpretation to Be Applied to the Scriptures as to Other Books?” Biblical Repository 2, no. 5 (1832): 124–37; and Stuart, “Remarks on Hahn’s Definition of Interpretation and Some Topics Connected with It,”
Biblical Repository 1, no. 1 (1831): 139–60. See also his unpublished lectures on Biblical interpretation at the Andover Newton Theological School.
Moses Stuart, “Lectures on Hermeneutics, 1 and 2,” Moses Stuart Papers, Andover Newton Theological School Library, Andover Newton Theological School, Newton.
Stuart, “Hahn’s Definition of Interpretation,” 158.
Moses Stuart, Critical History and Defence of the Old Testament Canon (New York: Mark H. Newman, 1845), 23.
R. W. Yarbrough writes that Stuart naively believed that philological methods could discover the genuine meaning of the text with absolute certainty. He was guilty of “philological positivism.” Yarbrough, “Moses Stuart,” 370. Stuart, “Hahn’s Definition of Interpretation,” 139; Stuart, Critical History and Defence of the Old Testament Canon, 3.
Stuart, “Hints Respecting Commentaries upon the Scriptures,” Biblical Repository 3, no. 9 (1833): 148.
Stuart, “Principles of Interpretation,” 134–35.
Stuart, “Lectures on Hermeneutics 2 and 3,” Moses Stuart Papers; Stuart, “Principles of Interpretation,” 124–37; and Stuart, “Study of the German Language,” 449.
For recent scholarship on the Bible and slavery, see Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” in Religion and the Civil War, ed. Harry Stout, Randall Miller, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43–73; J. Albert Harrill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture 10, no. 2 (2000): 149–86.
For proslavery arguments based on a literal and plain interpretation of the Bible, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Geneovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ World View (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Theodore Parker, The Slave Power (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1910]), 272; Noll, “Bible and Slavery,” 51; George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993 [1965]); Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Other abolitionists including Jonathan Blanchard, Albert Barnes, and Henry Ward Beecher also moved from the Bible’s letter to its spirit. Many associated this move with the liberal theology of the Unitarians. Thus this approach was not popular among many conservative Americans. Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” 51.
On this issue of moral progress and biblical interpretation, see Molly Oshatz, “The Problem of Moral Progress: The Slavery Debate and the Development of Liberal Protestantism in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 2 (2008): 225–50.
Noll, “Bible and Slavery,” 44–45, 51–52.
Harrill, “New Testament in the American Slave Controversy,” 151.
Oshatz, “The Problem of Moral Progress,” 230.
Charles Hodge, “Review of ‘Slavery’ by William Ellery Channing,” The Biblical Repertory and Theological Review 8, no. 2: 283.
Grant Wacker, “The Demise of Biblical Civilization” in The Bible in Amer ica: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll (New York:
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Lee, M.J. (2013). Epilogue The Orthodox Reconcile with the Past. In: The Erosion of Biblical Certainty. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299666_8
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