1. Whitehead, Alfred North, “The Nineteenth Century,” in Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 96.Google Scholar

2. This essay deals with the literary production of self-proclaimed Christian modernists in an effort to complicate the primarily theological interpretation of this diverse movement. I rely heavily on the historical and theological expositions of the following bibliography: Arnold, Charles Harvey, Near the Edge of Battle: A Short History of the Divinity School and the “Chicago School of Theology,” 1886–1966 (Chicago: The Divinity School Association, 1966)Google Scholar; Bebbington, D. W., “Evangelical Christianity and Modernism,” Crux 26:2 (06 1990): 2–9Google Scholar; Bowden, Henry Warner, Church History in an Age of Uncertainty: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1906–1990 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Bretell, Robert W., ed., The Empirical Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman (New York: Macmillan, 1963)Google Scholar; Dorrien, Gary, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2003)Google Scholar; Dorrien, Gary, “Modernisms in Theology: Interpreting American Liberal Theology, 1805–1950,” American Journal of Philosophy and Theology 23:3 (09 2002): 200–220Google Scholar; Green, Jay D., “A Creed for Modernism: Shirley Jackson Case and the Irony of Modern Approaches to ‘Faith and History,’” Fides et Historia 29:3 (fall 1997): 38–49Google Scholar; Handy, Robert T., “Fundamentalism and Modernism in Perspective,” Religion in Life 24:3 (summer 1955): 381–94Google Scholar; Hutchison, William R., “Cultural Strain and Protestant Liberalism,” American Historical Review 76:2 (04 1971): 386–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hutchison, William R., “Getting to Know Modernism,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 2:2 (winter 1969): 1–3Google Scholar; Hutchison, William, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Lease, Gary, “Modernism and ‘Modernism’: Christianity as a Product of its Culture,” Journal for the Study of Religion 1 (09 1988): 3–23Google Scholar; Peden, Creighton, The Chicago School: Voices in Liberal Religious Thought (Bristol, Ind.: Wyndham Hall, 1987)Google Scholar; Peden, W. Creighton and Stone, Jerome A., ed., The Chicago School of Theology—Pioneers in Religious Inquiry, Studies on American Religion, vol. 66a (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1996)Google Scholar; Pierson, Samuel C., “The Cave Affair: Protestant Thought in the Gilded Age,” Encounter 41 (spring 1980): 179–203Google Scholar; Sweet, Leonard I., “The University of Chicago Revisited: The Modernization of Theology, 1890–1940,” Foundations 22 (10–12 1979): 324–51.Google Scholar

3. Key works on “fundamentalism” include Antes, Peter, “Fundamentalism: A Western Term With Consequences,” in Perspectives on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, ed. Armin, Geertz and McCutcheon, Russell T. (Leiden: Brill, 2000)Google Scholar; Carter, Paul A., “The Fundamentalist Defense of the Faith,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John, Braeman and others (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 179–214Google Scholar; Hart, D. G., “When Is A Fundamentalist a Modernist? J. Gresham Machen, Cultural Modernism, and Conservative Protestantism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65:3 (fall 1997): 605–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keddie, Nikki R., “The New Religious Politics: Where, When, and Why Do ‘Fundamentalisms’ Appear?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40:4 (10 1998): 696–723CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kippenberg, Hans G., “Revolt Against Modernism: A Note on Some Recent Comparative Studies in Fundamentalism,” Numen 38:1 (01 1991): 128–33Google Scholar; Lawrence, Bruce B., “Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age,” Religious Studies Review 19:4 (10 1993): 287–97Google Scholar; Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Portier, William L., “Fundamentalism in North America: A Modern Anti-Modernism,” Communio 28 (fall 2001): 581–98Google Scholar; Westerman, Pauline C., “The Modernity of Fundamentalism,” Journal of Religion 74:1 (01 1994): 77–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. The one exception to this statement is Dorrien's, GaryThe Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2003)Google Scholar. Dorrien dispenses with any definitional dilemmas in his introduction when he neatly divides “modernist” discourse from “liberal” thought and points to the general fusion of “evangelical” and “modernist” epistemologies. Dorrien's comprehensive investigation into early-twentieth-century Christian thinkers is a chapter in his longer saga of liberal theology, but it is not a chronologically contingent analysis of theological positioning. Although he provides a subtle survey of liberal Protestantism from 1900 to 1950, Dorrien never engages with the pronounced discourse of modernist self-definition to which this essay is devoted.

5. Hutchison, William, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, 2.Google Scholar

6. Although movements in Catholicism and Buddhism have been interpreted as explicitly “modernist” developments, within synthetic narratives of American religious history, the term “modernist” refers exclusively to a particular cohort of theologians clustered at Yale and at the University of Chicago. These liberal Protestants offered, in the words of The Encyclopedia of American Religious History (1996), a “radical readjustment of Protestant theology in light of new intellectual and scientific developments.” Other dictionary and encyclopedia definitions of modernism only echo this Protestant particularity. For example, in his A Religious History of the American People (1972), Sydney Ahlstrom describes Catholic modernism only to note its swift condemnation by church authorities. According to Ahlstrom, the liberal theologies espoused at Chicago and Yale would persist well into the twentieth century; for that reason, he considered Protestant modernism to be the only intellectually consequential form of religious modernism. Regardless of the epistemological veracity of such a reduction, Protestant determinations will form the definitional center of any religious modernism. This essay uses the terms “Christian” and “Protestantism” interchangeably, paying no attention to the broad discourse of modernism within Roman Catholicism during this time. For more on Catholic modernism, see Gilkey, Langdon Brown, Catholicism Confronts Modernity: A Protestant View (New York: Seabury, 1975)Google Scholar; Hill, Harvey, The Politics of Modernism: Alfred Loisy and the Scientific Study of Religion (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Darrell, Jodock, ed., Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Woods, Thomas E., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The choice to delete any Catholic modernists from this analysis was an intentioned choice: while I believe Catholic modernism posed important challenges to that particular tradition, I believe Protestant modernism has determined discussions of “modernism” within religious studies. This is an assertion that obviously deserves far greater substantiation and rebuttal by students of American Catholicism. For now, as endorsement I turn to Lewis Brastow, professor of practical theology at Yale University, who offers a typically modernist take on the unique relationship between Protestantism and the modern pulpit:

It is Protestantism only that in the fullest sense may be said to have, either in theory or in fact, a modern pulpit. The preaching of the Roman Catholic Church is not underestimated, nor its value minimized. It had notable merits of its own and is worthy of careful study…. But it has no time-spirit. It assumes to be superior to modern life. It would dominate the modern world, not be dominated by it. Of course it must adjust itself to what is temporal, and in much it is really as modern as the Protestant pulpit. But its claim to be superior to temporary influences is measurably justified, and it shares the fortune of a church that would be, like its founder, “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” [ Brastow, Lewis, The Modern Pulpit (New York: Macmillan, 1906), vii.]Google Scholar

Brastow, authored an analogous survey of “moderns” two years earlier in the form of Representative Modern Preachers (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), a volume that included profiles of Schleiermacher, Frederick William Robertson, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Bushnell, Phillips Brooks, John Henry Newman, James Bowling Mozley, Thomas Guthrie, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon.Google Scholar

7. Haydon, A. Eustace, “Introduction,” in Modern Trends in World-Religions, ed. Haydon, A. Eustace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), vii and ix.Google Scholar

8. Emmett, Cyril W., “The Modernist Movement in the Church of England,” Journal of Religion 2 (11 1922): 562.Google Scholar

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10. This is perhaps best illustrated by Hutchison's Modernist Impulse, which includes a rich portrait of the complex social networks and cultural ambitions of the Protestant modernists. It would be impossible to deny the detailed curricular focus of Christian activist and Northwestern University professor George A. Coe, or the passionate ecumenical efforts of Newman Smyth. Hutchison's profile of these modernists poses countless examples of consequential liberal campaigning and, moreover, provides a clear view of the modernists' substantive social interconnectivity. Even their joint vacationing practices demonstrated the high premium placed on public ritual and interactive Christian fellowship by Protestant modernists.

11. The scholarship on cultural modernism is vast; works underlining this particular emphasis include Beebe, Maurice, “Introduction: What Modernism Was,” Journal of Modern Literature 3:5 (07 1974): 1065–84Google Scholar; Jameson, Fredric, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of Present (London: Verso, 2002)Google Scholar; Ross, Dorothy, “Introduction: Modernism Reconsidered,” in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930, ed. Dorothy, Ross (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. For documentary evidence underlining this assertion, see Malcolm, Bradbury and James, McFarlane, ed., Modernism: 1890–1930 (New York: Penguin, 1976)Google Scholar; Charles, Harrison and Fred, Orton, ed., Modernism, Criticism, Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984).Google Scholar

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14. Harrison, Charles, “Modernism,” 147.Google Scholar

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18. Ibid., 245.

19. Ibid., 247.

20. Ibid., 345.

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22. Cooke, Richard Joseph, “What Is Modernism,” Methodist Review 112 (03 1929): 187.Google Scholar

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26. It is tempting to force this analogy between sixteenth-century and early-twentieth-century reformers. However, the scientific and technological innovations of the nineteenth century distinguish this era of crisis. In section V of this essay I explore further the modernists' understandings of their present age. It is useful to keep in mind, however, the lengthy tradition of method and methodology in the history of Protestantism From John Calvin's “new devotion” to John Wesley's “second blessing,” Protestants had defined their multifarious offshoots by the particularity of their tactical revisions. The protests of one Protestant against another were inevitably premised on methodological critique; the resultant sectarianism was determined by the chosen methodological correctives of the protesting parties. The modernists profiled here simply took the cycle of Protestant protestations to their practical extreme: now, their practice of religious criticism would define their Christianity.

27. Little, Charles Joseph, “The Place of Christ in Modern Thought,” Methodist Review 81 (03 1899): 191.Google Scholar

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48. Modernists deploy “faith” and “belief” somewhat differently, using “belief” to stipulate a hypothesis or idea, whereas “faith” is a constancy built from the persistent weighing of asserted beliefs.

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58. Some historians have interpreted American Protestant modernism as an apologetic response to German biblical criticism; I see no proof of such an implication.

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