Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing

Despite Andover Theological Seminary being the site of a good deal of edifying theological discourse in the nineteenth century, that institution has not received the attention it deserves. Sara Paretsky's short book, which is essentially the dissertation that she completed at the University of Chicago in 1977, focusing on intellectual life at the seminary in the first half of the nineteenth century, helps fill this void. The argument she makes is straightforward, persuasive, and—as one would expect from someone who has received more than a little acclaim for her series of popular detective novels—well written. Andover Seminary's founding in 1808 was motivated primarily by orthodox Calvinists' desire to promote the tenets of their faith and provide an educational counter to Unitarian Harvard College. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the efforts of Andover faculty members and others who resided within the seminary's broader orbit to incorporate developments in biblical studies, historical scholarship, and the natural sciences undermined orthodox Calvinism. Increasingly, scholars associated with the seminary abandoned the notion that theology was the “queen of the sciences” and subordinated theological claims to knowledge gleaned from other disciplines (p. 99). By the late nineteenth century, Paretsky contends, faculty members at Andover had adopted a “progressive orthodoxy” predicated on a repudiation of the original commitments to the preeminence of both reason and revelation (p. 116

Argument (complex analysis · Calvinism · Faith · Orthodoxy · Political science · Revelation · Scholarship · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Theological seminary · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies