Between Faith and Unbelief is a thought-provoking investigation of nineteenth-century transatlantic theological dialogues about God, Jesus, the Bible, Christian tradition, and human consciousness. The study might better have been named “American Transcendentalists and German Philosophy.” Not only is Elisabeth Hurth's prevailing interest in German thinkers, but national character also strongly distinguished responses to “the challenge of atheism” on different soils. Hurth makes an excellent case that New England's liberal Christians fully grasped the unsettling biblical criticism and naturalistic psychology of figures such as David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. She argues carefully that the “atheism” courted boldly by the Germans was merely “part of the discursive and religious context from which American Transcendentalism emerged” (1). Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were not, in this formulation, full-blown doubters. But even this thesis proves difficult to defend because of stubborn American belief. Time and again Hurth falls back on the claim that “atheistic tendencies” in Transcendentalist idealism “latently harbored” skepticism, then admits that “all members of New England divinity came together with remarkable unanimity to condemn” one soul-chilling German conclusion or another (142, 126, 101). Hurth does well to take us to the brink where the Transcendentalists saw the potential for naturalistic solipsism in their heart-felt faith. But she declines fully to explore, as she says in the case of Emerson, the seeming American “aversion to unbelief” (153).
Hurth leaves no doubt that Boston intellectuals were driven by a combined sense of public responsibility and personal curiosity to read German texts. Members of the first generation of young men to study in Germany beginning in the 1810s, including Edward Everett and George Bancroft, were so distressed to discover how unreliable the Bible was that they abandoned careers in the ministry. Yet as time went on, the Americans learned to contain Germans questions. In the early 1850s, Theodore Parker used Feuerbach's proposition that religions are nothing but projections of consciousness to discredit traditional Christian doctrines. His own version of faith somehow escaped suspicion of fabrication and was thereby defended. At about the same time, Arthur Schopenhauer's location of belief in the will stirred debate in Boston. The commonplace judgment that Schopenhauer championed irrationality and pessimism, however, curtailed any chance that he would gain an American following. When other defenses failed, the Transcendentalists dismissed troubling German thoughts as overly speculative and “dogmatic,” the critique launched at Schopenhauer by George Ripley (132). As brave religious thinkers, the Transcendentalists took up German historicism, subjectivism, and naturalism—all casting doubt on the Christian revelation—because the Germans opened questions of genuine and indeed common concern. German logic, however, did not make them unbelievers.
Hurth stumbles in explaining why this was so, because her keen interest in Germany precludes attention to Britain. The Transcendentalists' reading of Continental philosophy was ancillary to their immersion in a British intellectual tradition that located authority in experience and aimed first and foremost to produce moral behavior. In German texts, the Transcendentalists found stark and unfamiliar logical oppositions: supernatural and natural, objectivity and subjectivity, faith and skepticism. More than once they deflected a choice between unappealing poles by refusing, on practical and moral grounds, to discuss the matter at all. Whether Jesus was savior, man, or myth was unimportant to William Henry Furness compared with the fact that he was a friend: “What attracted Furness to the human figure of Jesus was not a biblico-exegetical concern but rather the interest in exemplary uses of Jesus” (41). Whereas the Germans spoke about religious sentiment as the wellspring of faith, the Americans simply behaved as if their own feelings were as good an argument as any.
This reliance on humble instinct as a trusted guide to moral truth made sense in light of Scottish Common Sense Realism, the philosophical foundation of Unitarianism and the antecedent to Transcendentalist epistemology. Hurth makes no mention of the Scottish philosophers or of William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian spokesman who best rephrased the Scots' modest trust in human nature for liberal American Christians. As a theory of knowing, Common Sense shielded American readers of German books from skepticism. The Germans presented historical revelation and subjective imagination as equally problematic sources of religious ideas. Common Sense resolved the impasse: the heart may really know God. Although the Transcendentalists sounded like German Romantics such as Friedrich Schleiermacher when they abandoned the wording “common sense” for “intuition,” they were still convinced that the human community possessed a natural and shared capacity to discern moral precepts. When the Bible disappointed the critical eye, the self remained trustworthy, and if ratiocination even then succeeded in provoking doubts, old-fashioned common sense intervened to defend the social good. Hurth senses this Transcendentalist temperament when she observes that Emerson was known in his day as a “Yankee mystic” (149). She misses how much this craggy pragmatism and optimism owed to British intellectual roots, however, and most recently to Scottish Realism.
Between Faith and Unbelief succeeds as theological inquiry. The Transcendentalists encountered ideas with atheistic implications in their reading to which they gave serious attention. Why they remained faithful believers might be more fully answered by a cultural analysis of international dialogue. Hurth's probing book is an invitation for further study of the margin where religious faith surprisingly veers in the direction of its opposite.
