YALE IN DIVINITY

By

BENJAMIN W. BACON

The services of Yale to theology have been preeminent, as was to be anticipated from the design of her founders. These services may be grouped according to the two centuries of her existence. Throughout the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth no separate School of Religion existed. In the opening years of the nineteenth, plans had already been formed for a separate Department of Theology by President Timothy Dwight, himself the leading theologian of his time; but two further decades were required to bring these plans to their fruition. Until the founding in 1822 of the present School of Religion the college itself had been from its foundation in 1701 a School of Religion, making the study of theology the culminating point of its curriculum. In this period inevitably its services to theology were predominantly the contributions of individual men, Jonathan Edwards, one of the earliest and still the most illustrious of its graduates, leading the van.

The second century of service, which to-day in its turn is rounding to completion, is one of research and training under the university system of separate departments for the chief lines of cultural development. Names of great individual leaders of thought and activity naturally do not cease to appear. They are even increased in number. But over and above the individual services of graduates of the college and School of Theology such as Horace Bushnell, Peter Parker, and Theodore Thornton Munger, there must be reckoned the contribution of the School itself. In the eighteenth century the theology distinctive of Yale,

indeed distinctive of America, was the reconstructed Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards. This was called "the New England Theology." It was in substance an adjustment of the too a priori system of Calvin to the rigorous realism of John Locke by whom Edwards was profoundly influenced. The modifications introduced by Hopkins, Bellamy, West, Smalley, Emmons, Dwight, and the younger Edwards, were intended as "improvements," not as refutations, and belonged like the system of Edwards in the field of the psychology of religion. Though designated "the New England Theology" it was really a product of Yale; for, as Secretary Stokes remarks, in his Memorials of Eminent Yale Men, "Of the eight leaders who created this 'system' and handed it down with their own modifications from generation to generation, all but one were graduates, . . and the other, the younger Edwards, was a 'grandson' of Yale and a New Haven pastor."

A different line of theological development, but one in which the fame of Yale was destined later to stand no less high, is marked even in these early days by the name of Moses Stuart of the Class of 1799, "the founder of modern biblical scholarship in America.' What Ezra Stiles had done for an earlier generation, what William R. Harper did for our own, Moses Stuart did for his, and perpetuated the work by his writings and the work of those whom he taught at Andover.

But the attention of the world was still concentrated upon theology proper, rather than the problems of biblical and historical criticism for which the linguistic studies of "Moses Stuart-the man who unfettered religious thought in America" were to prepare the way. The new adaptation of Calvinism which was to meet more effectively than any other this side the Atlantic the sweeping revelations of physical science and the doctrine of evolution was known as "the New Haven theology." This designation was undoubtedly framed to distinguish the more progressive branch of New England Theology represented by Nathaniel W. Taylor and his associates in the newly formed Theological Department of the University from the conservative, represented by Dr. Bennet Tyler (B.A. Yale 1804) and his associates in the Seminary

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formed at East Windsor and later removed to Hartford.

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the progressive and the reactionary types of New England theology were therefore, in a sense, products of Yale. It was the progressive, however, which continued to be representative of the University and remained in vital relation to it.

From the founding of the Department until his death in 1858 Nathaniel W. Taylor was so much the central figure of the Yale School of Divinity that its type of thought, characterized by the doctrines of the moral government of God, and of the reality of evil (both physical and moral) as incidental to the best possible universe, might well have borne his name, as its predecessor had borne the name of Edwards. But the theology of Dr. Taylor was justly called "New Haven" theology; for it had a continuity in two directions not practicable to the earlier time. The New Haven theology was the joint work of a group of men including Fitch and Goodrich within the school itself. Moreover it was defended, improved, and supplemented by a group of theologians both within and without the school whose contributions to the theological thinking of America stand preeminent. As Edwards marks an epoch for the eighteenth century by his adjustment of Calvinistic anthropology to the new science of Locke, so Horace Bushnell, reinterpreting the natural world in terms of spirit, paved the way for modern theology, and marks the beginning of a school destined to bring the New England theology into line with modern science and criticism and the doctrine of evolution. Among the graduates who continued Bushnell's work must be named Theodore T. Munger, author of The Freedom of Faith, and as a graduate of Yale but not of its Divinity School, Elisha Mulford, author of The Republic of God.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a new birth of the New Haven theology. With the death of Taylor in 1858, and the death or retirement of his associates of "the old faculty," the Divinity School had experienced a severe decline. The period of the Civil War was a period of its reorganization. To its faculty were added successively in 1858 Timothy Dwight the younger as Professor of Sacred Literature, in 1861 George P.