fallible logic of sensation; to rest its truths exclusively upon the authenticity of old manuscripts.(24)

This critique pointed to the Unitarian reliance upon the authenticity of the Bible; from the Unitarian perspective, if doubt could be shed on the Bible, then Christianity itself could be questioned. These criticisms soon culminated in the major conflict between the Unitarians and their Transcendentalist offspring, the miracles controversy.(25)

The miracles controversy was an extended argument between the Transcendentalists and the Unitarians about the basic evidences of Christianity. As explained by historian Daniel Walker Howe, the controversy consisted of an attack by the Transcendentalists on the Unitarian reliance upon "supernatural rationalism . . . , the doctrine that Christ's teachings had been authenticated by the miracles he performed."26 Emerson instigated the controversy in his 1838 address to the seniors of Harvard's Divinity School. Citing the "universal decay and now almost death of faith in society," Emerson attacked both the "monster" of miracle and the "noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus."(27) In place of these fountainheads of traditional Chrisfianity, Emerson advocated a spirituality rooted in intuition.

Although Emerson's "Divinity School Address" was an early and very public expression of Transcendentalist ideas, George Ripley, also a former Unitarian minister, had clearly expressed similar sentiments in an 1836 article in the Christian Examiner. Ripley argued that intuition as evidence for Christianity should outweigh concerns such as the authenticity of the Bible:

We wish only to maintain what we deem a better mode of examining the evidence of Christianity than that which is usually pursued in the study of theology. The adoption of this mode ... would remove some of the strongest objections of infidels, and convert the timid and wavering faith of multitudes into strong and masculine conviction. Let the study of theology commence with the study of human consciousness. Let us ascertain what is meant by the expression . . . the Image of God in the Soul of Man. Let us determine whether our nature has any revelation of the Deity within itself; and, if so, analyze and describe it. If we there discover . . . a criterion of truth, by which we can pass judgment on the Spiritual and Infinite, we shall then be prepared to examine the claims of a Divine Revelation in history.(28)

24. Ibid., 94.

25. The orthodox also understood the Transcendentalists in opposition to the "Baconian" or "sensuous" philosophy and theology endorsed by the both the orthodox and the Unitarians. See Hitchcock, Religious Truth, 26

26. Daniel Walker Howe, "At Morning Blest Golden-Browed," A Stream of Light: A Short His toru of American Unitarian ism, ed. Conrad Wright (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1975), 47.
Ripley thus fused both the intuitivism of the Transcendentalists with their dissatisfaction with the Unitarian supernatural rationalism. He was not arguing that Christianity did not need to be supported by reasonable evidence, but that the strongest and most irrefutable evidence could be found in the human consciousness.

Theodore Parker (1810-60), the most avid student of the latest German Biblical criticism, developed the most comprehensive attack of the Unitarian reliance upon miracles and historical Christianity. Parker was distinct from the other Transcendentalists in several ways. Unlike most other Unitarian ministers who moved toward Transcendentalism, Parker retained his pulpit: more than the others (especially Emerson), he saw himself as working within the context of Christianity.  He also had more respect for reason than the other Transcendentalists, and criticized Emerson's elevation of "ecstasy" over more rigorous forms of thought.(29) In 1840 Parker wrote a review for the Life of Jesus written by Friederich Strauss, a German Bible scholar. While complementing the thoroughness of Strauss's scholarship, Parker upheld that any objections to Christianity uncovered by Strauss "carried along with fthem their]  ... own abundant refutation."(30) Parker believed that a more apt title for the Life would be "A Fundamental Criticism on the Four Gospels." Parker did not at that time accept all of Strauss's "objections to historical Christianity," and he argued against many of Strauss's assumptions, such as the impossibility of miracles. But he also argued that Strauss's example was an important precedent of "free religious thought" because it showed that Christianity, "cherished and clung to by the choicest hopes, the deepest desires of the human race, is not in a moment to be displaced by a book."(31) To explain why such criticism could not destroy Christianity, he quoted a German writer who upheld that the memory of Jesus would never disappear because his image had been "stamped ineffaceably on the hearts of men." Parker did not at that time believe that criticism of historical Christianity could destroy the place of Jesus in religion.

27. Ralph Waldo Fmerson, "The Divinity School Address," Selected Essays, Lectures, and Pocms, ed. Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam, 1990), 114, 111, 112.

28. George Ripley, "Martineau's Rationale," The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1950), 132.

29. Herbert Schneider has argued that Parker's transcendentalism was "more critical
than romantic." See Schneider, History of American Philosophy (266-7) and Theodore
Parker, "Thoughts on Theology," The Dial, vol.II, 492 (This article was published in 1842.).
John Fdward Dirks has examined the question of to what extent Parker was a
Transcendentalist. Most revealing on this topic are Parker's criticisms of Emerson. See
Dirk's The Critical Theology of Theodore Parker (New York: Columbia UP, 1948), 25-27.

30. Theodore Parker, "Strauss's Life of Jesus," The Christian Examiner July 1840): 35.

31. Ibid., 316.
By the next year (1841), however, when he preached his most famous sermon, The Transient and Permanent in Christianity," Parker had accepted most of Strauss's conclusions. The victim of his sermon was all of the doctrine and formalities of Christianity These aspects of Christianity, argued Parker, were merely transitory, always changing and unimportant. The important core of Christianity was morality:

To turn away from the disputes of the Catholics and the Protestants, of the Unitarian and the Trinitarian, of old school and new school, and to come to the plain words of Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity is a simple thing, very simple. It is absolute, pure morality."(32)

After dismissing the importance of doctrinal disputes and singling out the essential meaning of Christianity, he attacked the Christian tendency to raise the scriptures above human beings, to make them the infallible words of God:

modern criticism is fast breaking to pieces this idol which men have made out of the scriptures. It has shown that here are the most different works thrown together; that their authors, wise as they sometimes were, pious as we often feel often their spirit to have been, had only that inspiration which is common to other men equally pious and wise; that they were by no means infallible, but were mistaken in facts or in reasoning-uttered predictions which time has not fulfilled; men who in some measure partook of the darkness and limited notions of their age, and were not always above its mistakes or its corruptions.(33)

Many Unitarians of the time accepted this view that the scriptures were neither literally inspired nor infallible, but none could accept the attack that Parker proceeded to make against the significance of Jesus.(34)

Parker aimed to eliminate the Unitarians' supernatural rationalism, which proved the legitimacy of Christianity by focusing on the person of Jesus and the miracles that verified his message, both doctrinal and moral. Parker repudiated this dependence on Jesus, arguing that "It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid."(35). So not only did he deny that the scriptures were a permanent and crucial aspect of Christianity, but he dropped his earlier assumption that the importance of Jesus was perpetual and argued that the person of Jesus, too, was a transient aspect of Christianity.

32. "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity," Theodore Parker: An Anthology, ed. Henry Steele Commager (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 56.

33. Ibid., 47.

34. Brown, 158-9.

35. Parker, "The Transient," 49.
The truths of Christianity, argued Parker, had support independent of historical Christianity. The scriptures and the miracles of Jesus were not needed to prove or justify Christian truth:

If Jesus had taught at Athens, and not at Jerusalem; if he had wrought no miracle, and none but the human nature had ever been ascribed to him; if the Old Testament had for ever perished at his birth, Christianity would still have been the word of God; it would have lost none of its truths.(36)

The enduring, permanent truth that Parker believed was central to Jesus' teachings and to Christianity was its morality, "the love of man; the love of God."(37) True religion consisted in no other creeds.

Within another year, Parker had constructed a critique of contemporary theology from the basis of the methods used in the other sciences.(38) Parker compared the progress of theology with that of other fields of knowledge, such as the natural sciences, and argued that the modern method of theology inhibited all progress. Parker used the "meaning of miracles" as an example of the defective method:

The general thesis is, that miracles confirm the authority of him who works them, and authenticate his teachings to be divine. We will state it in a syllogistic and more concrete form. Every miracle-worker is a heaven-sent and infallible teacher of truth [the major premise]. Jonah is a miracle-worker [the minor premise]. Therefore Jonah is a heaven-sent and infallible teacher of truth. Now we should begin by denying the major in full, and go on to ask proofs of the minor. But the theological method is to assume both. When both premises are assumptions, the conclusion will be,-what we see it is.(39)

Parker argued that on a logical level, theology (as it was) assumed its premises rather than using observation and induction to find and validate premises. By comparing the theological method to the Baconian method used in other sciences, Parker showed that neither Unitarian nor orthodox theologians were living up to their own standards of rationality

36. Ibid., 50.

37. Ibid., 56.

38. Parker used the word science to label all fields of knowledge, whether natural, philosophical, or theological.

39. Theodore Parker, "Thoughts on Theology," The Dial vol.II., 494.
Horace Bushnell (1802-76), responding to many of the same influences as the Transcendentalists, developed an argument for Christianity that centered on the individual's inner experience rather than on natural theology and the Bible. Bushnell was a Congregationalist minister who was influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who also influenced the Transcendentalists). According to Sydney Ahlstrom, one of Bushnell's major impulses was to "fit the Christian message to the dominant presuppositions of his time by modifying those aspects of belief which scandalized many educated Americans."(40) Although Bushnell remained within the folds of orthodoxy, his fellow Calvinists often reproached him for his liberal understandings of the Trinity, atonement, sin, and the Bible.(41) One of Bushnell's major goals, as outlined in Nature and the Supernatural (1858), was to place the "supernatural" on "firm, intellectual ground."(42) Fighting the "new infidelity" that "propose[dl to make a science out of religion,"(43) he hoped to restore to Christianity the essential supernatural element that his contemporaries so often denied in favor of natural theology. Bushnell's use of the word supernatural defied the traditional understanding of the word, which saw a stark separation between the natural and the supernatural. According to Ahlstrom, Bushnell used supernatural to mean "every aspect of reality which is not caught up in the mechanical chain of physical cause and effect [e. g. life]. In such a view, nature and supernature are cosubstantial and interfused."(44)

Contrary to most evangelicals of his time, Bushnell rejected the infallibility of the Bible. His argument against the infallibility of the Bible centered on the fallible nature of human beings. Not only could mistakes have been made in the transmission of the Bible by manuscript, but the "canon was not made by men infallibly guided by the Spirit." Even if the Bible were infallible, Bushnell argued that human beings, with their imperfect reason, would have no way to verify its infallibility. The argument for infallibility, Bushnell believed, "must inevitably be lost," and if Christians continued to argue for it they would only find themselves making more and more concessions to naturalism.(45) Therefore, he concluded, Christians should forego trying to prove the infallibility of the Bible and focus on other issues.

40. Sydney Il. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale,

1972), 610.

4l. Ibid., 611-13.

42. Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural (New York: Charles Scribner, 1858),

520.

43. Ibid., 16-7.

44. Ahlstrom, 612.

45. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 33-5.
Bushnell understood the Bible's truth in a metaphorical way, as opposed to the more literal and factual way common to the orthodox  The Bible, in Bushnell's eyes, did not consist of a series of facts: it could not be treated scientifically, and no scientific theology could be built upon it. Bushnell argued that human language itself, and the poetic Bible in particular, did not lend themselves to scientific treatment:

Is there any hope for theological science left? None at all, I answer most unequivocally. Human language is a gift to the imagination so essentially metaphoric . . . that it has no exact blocks of meaning to build up a science of. Who would ever think of building up a science of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton? And the Bible is not a whit less poetic, or a whit less metaphoric, or a particle less difficult to be propositionalized in the terms of the understanding.(46)

The words of the Bible, he believed, were not "exact blocks," like those of mathematical language (or empirical observations)

In addition to rejecting the possibility and utility of any scientific study of the Bible, Bushnell also argued against the use of natural theology to "prove" God. Because natural theology looked only for God acting in nature, in natural ways, it completely ignored the supernatural aspect of God, which was not observable in nature. Attempts to prove God through natural evidence, Bushnell argued, actually worked to the detriment of faith "because the God we prove does not meet our living wants, being only a name for causes, or a God of causes." The result of limiting God to what is evidenced in nature is that "Christianity dies out on our hands, for the want of a christian God."(47)

Bushnell found natural theology flawed because of its assumption that empirical evidence was the superior form of proof. Bushnell critiqued modern theologians for elevating natural theology to a "fundamental" position. They assumed that "any thing which can be proved for religion out of nature ... is . . . specially solid, and impossible to be doubted longer." This elevation of natural theology "requires all supernatural evidences to give way to it, as being themselves a more questionable kind of verity."(48) Thus with natural theology taking over, the more important supernatural aspects of religion became second-rate, and Christianity, deprived of its meaning, would be left to wither.

As an alternative to the mainstream rationalism, Bushnell recommended a faith rooted in personal experience. Bushnell did not, however, abandon the notion of seeking evidence for Christianity, but shifted this quest for evidence

46. "Our Gospel A Gift to the Imagination," Horace Bushnell: Sermons, ed. Conrad Cherry (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 109.

47. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 508.

48. Ibid., 506.
from the external focus on nature and the Bible to an internal focus on the human experience of faith. Bushnell upheld that Christ and Christianity, because of their supernatural origin, could not be derived from reason, but must first be accepted by faith. This experience of faith, he argued, provides subjective but compefling evidence for Christianity:

When [Christ is received by faithi . . . he is, of course, experienced or known by experience; in that manner verifie--he that believeth hath the witness in himself. The manner, therefore, of this divine experience, called faith, is strictly Baconian. And the result is an experimental knowledge of God, or an experimental acquaintance with God, in the reception of his supernatural communications.(49)

With this rather ironic redefinition of empiricism to include subjective experience, Bushnell apparently hoped to appeal to the reason of his contemporaries. But his fideistic position, which consisted of accepting Christianity on the basis of faith rather than on the basis of reason, was in fact a very old argument.

The alternate method of theology that Parker proposed went beyond Baconianism in its application. Baconianism, argued Parker, was too exclusive, sweeping "Love, God, and the Soul  ...  clean out of doors."(50) In place of Baconian sensationalism, Parker advocated the development of a systematic theology that centered on intuition:

[The theologianj must direct his eye inward on what passes there, studying the stars of that inner firmament, as the astronomer reads the phenomena of the heavens. He must also look outward on the face of nature and of man, and thus read the primitive Gospel God wrote on the heart of his child, and illustrated in the Earth and the sky and the events of life. Thus from observations made in the external world, made also in the internal world, comprising both the rtflcctizv and i'itiiitiz,c faculties of man, The is to frame the theory of God, of man, of the relation between God and man, and the duties that grow out of this relation, for with these four questions we suppose theology is exclusivelv concerned. This is the philosophical method, and it is strictly legitimate. It is pursued in the other sciences, and to good purpose.(51)

With these reflective and inductive tools, theologians could construct a new theology. Parker's plan to study human intuition and the world in a philosophical, even scientific, manner bears many similarities to deism in both its method and its outcome. Whether Parker defined himself as a deist or not, his focus on evidence from nature (including the intuition of human nature) was consistent with deistic standards of evidence. His innovation lies in his elevation of intuitive evi

49. Ibid, 521.

50. Parker, "Thoughts on Theology," 499.

51. Ibid., 495.
dence above evidence from the external world. Parker's conclusions also resembled those of deism, from its rejection of revelation to its stripping down of reli gion to its moral basics.

Despite any overt similarities between the romanticism of Bushnell and Parker, the two men had fundamentally different visions of Christianity. Labeling Parker as one "who has offended the christian public," Bushnell explicitly distinguished himself from Parker. The major distinction, according to Bushnell, lay in their different conceptions of the natural and supernatural:

Mr. Parker undertakes to frame a rational view of religion, that sets it on the footing of nature. I have undertaken to frame a rational view of religion, that comprehends nature and the supernatural, as coeternal factors in the universal system of God.(52)

For example, while Parker denied the possibility of miracles, Bushnell accepted miracles not as violations of the laws of nature, but as manifestations of the supernatural that exists with nature, on a higher plane than nature. This distinction drawn by Bushnell himself supports an understanding of Bushnell as a fideist, ultimately accepting Christianity by faith, and of Parker as a kind of deist, searching for basic religious principles as revealed in nature and in human intuition.

This difference in the basic orientations of Bushnell and Parker led them to different means for pursuing their shared goal, rescuing religion from demise at the hands of modern criticism. Bushnell approached the problem of protecting Christianity in a fairly traditional fideistic way. In his scheme, the human "experimental knowledge of God," faith, allowed people to accept the traditional Protestant beliefs, namely Bushnell's pseudo-orthodox doctrines. Bushnell thus saw the subjective experience of faith as the intellectual basis for Christianity.

Parker, on the other hand, willingly sacrificed what he considered to be the "transient" aspects of Christianity in order to re-establish the security of theism. Of course, most of Parker's contemporaries did not consider him to be a Christian at all. He jettisoned everything except Christian morality. In calling for a new theology, he asked that the "theologian. . . begin anew, trusting entirely to meditation, contemplation, and thought, and ask WHAT can be known of divine things, and HOW it can be known and legitimated."(53) Thus Parker would discard the traditional Christianity that Bushnell sought to save. When he looked to the already mentioned "inner firmament," Parker found three "primal intuitions of human nature": "the instinctive intuition of the divine, the instinctive intuition of the just and right, [and] the instinctive intuition of the immortal."(54) These intuitive basics could provide a foundation for a new theology that would retain the morality of Christianity but little else.

52. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 500.

53. Parker, "Thoughts on Theology," 495.

54. These words of Parker are quoted in Schneider, 267.
%w_ _While Bushnell attempted to found traditional Christianity on the subjective experience of faith, Parker opted to build a new theism rooted in the truths revealed by human intuition Ultimately, Bushnell's thought would have the most impact on later religious thinkers Although Parker never disassociated himself from Unitarianism or Christianity, most of his contemporaries like Bushnell believed that Parker had "offended the christian public" and had betrayed Christianity.(55) Despite the attacks of his contemporaries, Parker saw himself as working within the context of Christianity  In "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity," he expressed his idea that the Christianity of his day was just one passing phase of the true Christianity:

Let then the transient pass, fleet as it will; and may God send us some new manifestation of the Christian faith, that shall stir men's hearts as they were never stirred; some new word, which shall teach us what we are, and renew us all in the image of God.(56)

Thus regardless of how his contemporaries viewed him, Parker believed that his progressive vision of Christianity was the only savior from the increasingly meaningless and increasingly endangered form of Christianity that he believed was common to his time.(

Bushnell and Parker put forward their arguments with close attention to the evidence that they had to offer, and they did so with an amazing foresight Although neither could have foreseen the challenge of Darwin, they were both very sensitive to the challenges to Christianity arising from science and Biblical criticism, and they turned to new justifications for religion that would eliminate the new threats In Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, James Turner argued that the Christian reliance upon reason and science to support their religion led to the unbelief of the latter nineteenth century:

unbelief was not something that "happened to" religion. On the contrary, religion caused unbelief. In trying to adapt their religious beliefs to socioeconomic change, to new moral challenges, to novel problems of knowledge, to the fightening standards of science, the defenders of God slowly strangled Him. If anyone is to be arraigned for deicide, it is not Charles Darwin but his adversary Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, not the godless Robert Ingersoll but the godly Beecher family.(57)

Viewed in retrospect from the perspective of Turner's thesis, Parker and Bushnell seem correct in their assessments of the threat to Christianity from those who tried to defend it with reason and science Both men were self-consciously trying to find support for religion in areas that would not be challenged by modern Biblical criticism and science. Their respective solutions, although they were both controversial, could have perhaps sheltered Christianity against later attacks by shifting the persuasive power of Christianity away from nature and the Bible and toward the human soul

55. Ahlstrom, 606.

56. Parker, Anthology, 60.

57. Turner, xiii.