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Book Review: The Past And Future Shape Of American Theology

I T IS SURPRISING that Americans, who have so consistently interpreted their existence providentially, should only recently have begun to identify their religious self-understanding as a distinct kind of theology within the Christian tradition. Perhaps Herbert Richardson's Toward an American Theology initiated this investigation and Martin Marty's Righteous Empire extended it to the history of Protestantism in America. Now, however, with the publication of The American Religious Experience we have for the first time a full-scale study of the historical, philosophical, and theological roots, trends, and future of American theology. The thesis of this book is that the uniqueness of the American experience calls for a fresh approach to both religious life and its theological statement. That is to say, the economic, social, and political conditions in this country have worked to give our theology a specifically "American" cast. But unlike a mere theology of culture, this Christian thought is a creative development of the "spiritualistic" form of Protestantism which came to America with our Puritan, Baptist, and Quaker forefathers. Classical Calvinism emphasized a "second birth" experience which started with the recognition of man's utter depravity and moved to justification by means of a violent conversion. The Reformation theology which influenced our religious experience, however, was a "first birth" approach which posited the goodness of creation and went on to speak of sanctification by Christian nurture. This kind of Spirit-oriented theology was alien to Calvinism, with its strong sense of sin and determinism. The religious thought which developed here took a more optimistic view of man and his possibilities—not only because of its positive theological presuppositions but also because of the hope that our open frontiers and rich resources offered. No theology could have become distinctively American which did not place a strong emphasis both on man's freedom and on his potential