The Anglican Imagination

Portraits and Sketches of Modern Anglican Theologians

Robert Boak Slocum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317045069
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The variety and depth of Anglican theology is best engaged through personal encounter with its many sources - the theologians and theological witnesses themselves. Anglican theology is often worked out in personal terms that provide a synthesis between reflection on the truths of faith and the particular contexts of culture and life. This book presents modern Anglican theology through a unique 'gallery'. This theological gallery includes a portrait or sketch of ten Anglican writers - DuBose, Farrer, Stringfellow, Brooks, Kemper, DeKoven, McCord Adams, Polkinghorne, Gore and Macquarrie. Theological description, interpretation and application are included for each, with the presentations differing as widely as the theologians and theological witnesses themselves. Drawing together understandings and experiences of faith, this will be an invaluable resource for students of Anglican theology and anyone who seeks to understand the distinctive perspectives and contributions of Anglicanism relative to living faith and daily life.

1 William Porcher DuBose Salvation, the Spirit, and the Church

Robert Boak Slocum

DOI: 10.4324/9781315612423-1

William Porcher DuBose (April 11, 1836–August 18, 1918) is appreciated as one of the most original and creative theologians in the history of the Episcopal Church. The Civil War interrupted his studies in seminary. He was wounded in action and taken as a prisoner of war while serving as a Confederate soldier. After his release he was ordained deacon on December 13, 1863, and he ministered to soldiers during the war. After the Civil War he served as a parish priest in South Carolina. In 1871 he went to the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, to serve as chaplain. He helped to establish the School of Theology at Sewanee, and served as its second dean. He taught in both the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Theology. DuBose published seven books of theology, and he was a frequent contributor to The Constructive Quarterly, an ecumenical journal. A reunion of his former students in 1911 was the occasion for his presentation of papers on his life story relative to the truths of faith and theology. These papers were published as Turning Points in My Life. DuBose died in Sewanee, and is commemorated in the Episcopal Calendar of the church year on August 18.

William Porcher DuBose’s teaching career at Sewanee was deeply connected to his published theology. There was a spirit of free inquiry for discussion in his classes. He explains: “everything was to be tested and verified, according to our Lord’s prescription, in the light and in the terms of human nature, human life, and human destiny. All that was true for us ought to be true to us, and would be if we were in a state and attitude of correspondence with the truth. To establish this correspondence was our task.”¹ DuBose did not use old notes or manuscripts, preferring to approach “every day and every year anew, without any help from the past through any records of my own.”² Theodore Bratton, a student of DuBose who later became bishop of Mississippi, states that his approach in class was “altogether revolutionary in its departure from the stern, set forms of the time.”³

It was out of this environment that DuBose’s published theology emerged. He recalled “questions that arose within the class began to spread without the class, and the time came when it became necessary to make known my teaching to a larger audience.” It was his students “who in loving compulsion forced the publication of my first book, and have been behind as well in all the rest.” DuBose’s students were “in” his books because the dynamic of his classroom was formative for him as well as for them. He notes “I was in fact more one of them than one merely over them. I was finding and making myself in and with and through and by, as well as upon, them.”⁴ This process of active and open discussion is echoed by Bratton, who states “the Doctor’s students of the decade of 1880 to 1890 used to think and say, with no little pride, that the writing of the Soteriology was inspired by their inquiring minds, bristling with questions suggested by his lectures.”⁵

The effectiveness and life-changing impact of DuBose’s teaching was visible in a reunion of his former students at the university from August 2 to August 6, 1911, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of DuBose’s coming to Sewanee. The autobiographical papers DuBose read to his former students at the morning sessions of the reunion became part of his book Turning Points in My Life. DuBose was sharing new material with his former students. He states “I have always spoken from myself, but I have never spoken of myself.”⁶ Certainly the reunion was itself a turning point for DuBose, along with those he described in his presentations and his book. The reunion was the fullest public recognition in DuBose’s lifetime of the personal and theological contribution he made.

The result of DuBose’s theological method of open inquiry was visible in his former students who attended the reunion in his honor. They represented various pieties and interpretations in the Epsicopal Church. There were no “Dubosians.” But there were many who were furthered and formed in their own development and thinking by encounter with DuBose as their teacher. With respect to them, DuBose states, “the gathering is made up, not of those of one way, but of those of all the ways of thinking and believing in the Church. No one thinks of asking which way is most or least in evidence among us, because, with whatever of differences we have learned here to think and live together without sense or recognition of parties or partisanship. All honest and reasonable difficulties or convictions have been met and treated with equal interest, sympathy, and mutual respect and understanding.”⁷ DuBose’s idealism concerning his gathered former students is understandable. Nevertheless, he clearly saw in them the potential of a church where members of different perspectives could share in living and discerning the truth. His students were the living witness to the open forum that was his vision for the church.⁸

An example of such “differences” within the church is “expressed by the two terms Evangelical and Catholic,” which DuBose discusses in this Constructive Quarterly essay “Evangelical and Catholic: Each Needs the Other, Both Need the Chruch, and the Church Needs Both.” He notes “each of these terms … has become the designation of a ‘party’ in the church, almost synonymous with Catholic and Protestant in the wider field of Christianity.”⁹ In response to an evangelical tendency to emphasize the subjective in religion, and a catholic tendency to emphasize the objective in religion, DuBose urges a position of synthesis. The “sincere and religious ‘Catholic,’ however he may cling to and make much of what we may call the ‘externals’ of his religion, cannot be assumed to be not as much alive to all the subjective implications of it—faith, conversion, personal piety, etc.—as the earnest Evangelical is to all the objective presuppositions and grounds of his own subjectivity.” Instead, “the truly Evangelical as necessarily presupposes all the real Catholic, as the latter necessarily issues in the former.” DuBose urges much more than the tolerance of a “consent ‘to live and let live.’” The respective “sides” or perspectives need each other for mutual completion in the church.¹⁰

The openness DuBose called for was at the heart of his theological method for discerning truth by individual Christians and by the church. He believed it could work in the church because he had seen it work in his classroom for forty years, where his “place and part was in the mine, not in the mint, of the truth of Christianity, that free enquiry and investigation, not dogma (which would have its proper place after) was in order with us.”¹¹ With respect to this method, DuBose notes, “I believe that I always felt that skepticism and criticism were inevitable instruments of truth and righteousness and life, and that nothing in this world was proved, tested, or verified that had not passed through them to the uttermost end and limit.”¹²

DuBose believed the church should not fear the truth, nor should the church fear a process of free and open inquiry for the sake of truth. On the contrary, the church would ultimately be aided and strengthened by truth wherever discovered, and by the correcting or unmasking of any falsehood. Perceiving no “chasm” between natural and supernatural truth, Dubose was unafraid of the scientific method and the discoveries of science. Indeed, the church’s quest for truth can be furthered by the rigor of critical thought as used in the scientific method of DuBose’s day, and in biblical criticism. He explains: “this is an age in which everything must stand or fall by its own initial virtue of reality. Professions and pretensions must go down before the true and wholesome spirit of skepticism, criticism, and verification which will spare nothing as too sacred for it, and which is most needed just in the things that are the most sacred. The only thing on God’s earth that is going to escape or survive the winnowing fan, the refiner’s fire, that Christianity above all things ought to be and is, is the thing, whatever it is, that is genuine, that is real.”¹³

DuBose notes that “essential truths” like the truth of Jesus Christ or the truth of immortality “are their own best if not only proofs,” and that “apart from actual and adequate life and experience they can never be logically or speculatively demonstrated.”¹⁴ He urges “the final and only convincing proof of religion is the experience of what will perfect and complete human life.”¹⁵ Similarly, the things of the life of the spirit “cannot be known by proofs; they can be proved only by knowing.”¹⁶ We can verify the truth of religion only by “actual experiment or experience of it. We must live it in order to know it.”¹⁷ DuBose thus emphasizes the experiential nature of spiritual knowledge. He explained to his former students at the reunion: “I think I may say that whatever of inspiration or illumination ever came to you through my life or teaching, came through the fact that I presented Christ and Christianity at first hand, not in the letter but in the spirit, not in traditional or conventional forms or technical language, but in living terms of actual human relation and experience.”¹⁸ It is noteworthy that DuBose’s autobiography was not limited to religious experiences as such, but drew on the full range of his life. Through varied experiences he came to know God, and verified the reality of God’s presence in his life.

Experience is at the heart of DuBose’s theology. In The Gospel in the Gospels, DuBose notes that instead of using the “mere conventional language of Christianity,” he “would if possible speak in the common language of common experience.”¹⁹ He states that during his four years of military service in the Civil War he “acquired the habit of combining thought with life and experience.”²⁰ He emphasizes that we know as we can in all areas of life, including the spiritual. He explains “however God in any way or degree makes himself known to us, we may depend upon it that it is through our own way of knowing him.”²¹ Salvation operates “only through the natural and spiritual organs and activities of ourselves, our reason or intelligence, our affections and desires, our will, our acts and habits and character and life.” Our “actual environment” provides the opportunity for salvation because our “actual experience is just what we need to become all ourselves in Christ.”²²

DuBose’s emphasis on experience comes from his understanding of the incarnation. With respect to the prologue of the Gospel of John, DuBose n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface – Anglicanism: A Practical and Balanced Faith
• Acknowledgments
• 1 William Porcher DuBose: Salvation, the Spirit, and the Church
• 2 Austin Farrer: Hope and Glory
• 3 William Stringfellow: The Christian Witness Against Death
• 4 Phillips Brooks: Faith and Society
• 5 Jackson Kemper: A Missionary Bishop’s Path of Duty
• 6 James DeKoven: Romantic Religion and Transformative Faith
• 7 Marilyn McCord Adams: Christ and the Defeat of Horrors
• 8 John C. Polkinghorne: Bottom-Up Theology and Science
• 9 Charles Gore: The Holy Spirit and the Church
• 10 John Macquarrie: The Unfolding and Completion of Hope
• Index