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Douglas Sweeney's biography of the 19th-century theologian Nathaniel Taylor is part of a whole wave of scholarship on high American religious history propelled by Oxford University Press and Harry Stout's Religion in America series, and Eerdmans' Library of Religious Biography, edited by Mark Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and Allen Guelzo. This new religious history has many facets, but one of them, which Sweeney's Nathaniel Taylor exhibits, is the attempt to breathe life into the history of American divinity. The book under review is a more than competent examination of Taylor's ideas, but I am dubious if its style of presentation will resuscitate the subject.
Sweeney focuses on Taylor's theology, which he knows inside-out and which he lays out in an articulate fashion. Although the body of the book is short (150 pages), the 100 pages of notes are a treasure trove for the serious scholar. Sweeney aims to demolish the view of Taylor as a clever Arminian; he argues that while Taylor did have a major impact on evangelicalism and revivalism, it was beneficial and in the respectable and "orthodox" tradition of Jonathan Edwards. While Sweeney may be pushing the conventional interpretation of Taylor a bit, his characterization of Taylor as far more than a high-class Charles Finney is certainly correct. But Sweeney's overall strategy, which is to concentrate on Taylor's claims to be an Edwardsean, does not satisfy me.
As many readers of this magazine will be aware, Taylor made his career at the Yale Divinity School. When Congregationalism in New England seemed to have reached a dead-end composed of a rigid theoretical determinism, on the one hand, and an inability to combat various Massachusetts religious liberals, on the other, Taylor revitalized thinking by elaborating on a spontaneous human freedom. His scheme avoided problems of Calvinist fatalism and provided the framework for a socially concerned ministry to operate in southern New England. Taylor had a set of brains to marvel at, and Sweeney is at his best in explicating his vision. Sweeney also emphasizes, rightly, that Taylor thought of himself as carrying on the tradition of Edwards, and demonstrates at length not just the quality of Taylor's ideas but the way in which Taylor tried to think the tradition out of some of the troubles it had gotten itself into in its 75-year commentary on Edwards.
This is all to the good, but over and over again Sweeney tells us that Taylor was himself an Edwardsean. This special pleading falls short for three connected reasons.
First, Edwards' philosophical inheritance lies in Locke and Hume; Taylor's in Reid and Stewart. The latter developed a full-blown faculty psychology that is different from that of the former. Edwards' philosophy of mind contradicts Taylor's. It is as persuasive to call Taylor an Edwardsean as it is to call Reid a Lockean.
The second reason is that, consistent with his psychology, Taylor did elaborate a notion of the will's "power to the contrary." The bride at the altar could have said no, instead of yes, were her circumstances and character the same; she could have done otherwise—period. Not so for Edwards. He was a believer in a deterministic, causally governed world. This is the fundamental tenet of Freedom of the Will. Do we want to call someone an Edwardsean who denies this tenet?
The final reason is connected to this one, and readers will pardon an excursus into the thicket of theology. But it is necessary to make a point, for it is just this thicket that Sweeney cultivates.
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