World Without End

James H. Moorhead

Description

How belief in spiritual and material progress supplanted the Apocalypse in the world view of mainstream American Protestantism.

"In this compelling intellectual and social history, Moorhead argues that for mainline Protestants in the late 19th century, time became endless, human-directed and without urgency. . . . Moorhead offers some brilliant observations about the legacy of postmillennialism and the human need for a definitive eschaton." —Publishers Weekly

In the 19th century American Protestants firmly believed that when progress had run its course, there would be a Second Coming of Christ, the world would come to a supernatural End, and the predictions in the Apocalypse would come to pass. During the years covered in James Moorhead's study, however, moderate and liberal mainstream Protestants transformed this postmillennialism into a hope that this world would be the scene for limitless spiritual improvement and temporal progress. The sense of an End vanished with the arrival of the new millennium.

Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Postmillennial Tradition, 1800-1880
1. Prophecy, the Bible, and Millennialism
2. Millennial Dreams and Other Last Things
3. "A Summary Court in Perpetual Session"
4. "A Kingdom as Wide as the Earth Itself"
5. The Kingdom of God and the Efficiency Engineer
6. Efficiency and the Kingdom in a World at War
7. The Fundamentalist Controversy and Beyond
Epilogue

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Protestant
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Religión
• Protestantism
• General officer
• History of the Americas
• History of religions
• Christianity
• General
• United States
• Protestantisme

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 octobre 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253028501
• Langue: English

Extrait

World without End
The twenty-eighth volume in the series R ELIGION IN N ORTH A MERICA Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
World without End
MAINSTREAM AMERICAN PROTESTANT VISIONS
of the
LAST THINGS, 1880–1925

JAMES H. MOORHEAD
Indiana University Press BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404–3797 USA
http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [e-mail]
© 1999 by James H. Moorhead All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moorhead, James H. World without end: mainstream American Protestant visions of the last things, 1880- 1925 / James H. Moorhead. p. cm. — (Religion in North America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–253–33580–9 (alk. paper) 1. Eschatology—History of doctrines—19th century. 2. Protestant churches—Doctrines—History—19th century. 3. Protestant churches—United States—History—19th century. 4. Eschatology—History of doctrines—20th century. 5. Protestantchurches—Doctrines—History—20th century. 6. Protestant churches—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. BT819.5.M66        1999 236′.9′0973—dc21                                99–24448
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For Cynthia
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: The Postmillennial Tradition, 1800–1880
1 Prophecy, the Bible, and Millennialism
2 Millennial Dreams and Other Last Things
3 “A Summary Court in Perpetual Session”
4 A Kingdom “as Wide as the Earth Itself”
5 The Kingdom of God and the Efficiency Engineer
6 Efficiency and the Kingdom in a World at War
7 The Fundamentalist Controversy and Beyond
Epilogue
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
I N THIS VOLUME , James H. Moorhead, who is arguably the most perceptive interpreter of American postmillennialism today, carries his historical analysis of the development of that influential eschatological tradition to the time of its serious erosion in the opening decades of the twentieth century. In earlier publications, he examined the religious and social uses to which Northern Anglo-Protestants in mainstream churches applied postmillennial notions. Powerful reform movements, in times of both war and peace, drew religious energy from the eschatological vision of a this-worldly Kingdom of God and from the related concept of unending progress that was the product of human enterprise. Inauguration of a future millennial age, whether literal or figurative, rested on the shoulders of those working to improve society, whether by religious, social, or political means.
But the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, the time period that Moorhead examines closely in this volume, witnessed the demise of religious postmillennialism among “mainstream” northern Protestants. His narrative therefore describes the end of the idea of “the End of History” among middle-of-the road liberal religious communities, those denominations where this progressive outlook had previously dominated. This is the story of the loss of faith in predictive prophecy and of a corrosive ambiguity toward eschatology among moderate to liberal Protestants. Some commentators may be tempted to describe this change as simply the inevitable result of the process of secularization, but Moorhead’s analysis is far more subtle and probing than any such reductionist proposal.
Moorhead contextualizes his account by reminding us that millennialism, or religious apocalypticism of whatever stripe, needs to be understood as an effort to use biblical prophecy as a way to make sense of human experience. Postmillennial thinkers traditionally spoke of sacred and profane forces advancing together in harmony into the future, a judgment that was premised on a residual faith in the value of predictive prophecy. It was the loss of that faith that seriously eroded the postmillennial outlook. Even the rearguard efforts of some to retain belief in a possible Second Advent of Christ, while at the same time resorting to metaphorical interpretations of other traditional eschatological elements, failed to change what to Moorhead appears the inevitable destruction of postmillennial apocalypticism among mainstream Protestants.
Moorhead’s account of these intellectual changes demonstrates clearly how they were bound up with acts and deeds. His authorial stance is intrinsically a subtle critique of the kind of social-science reductionism that would relegate ideas to intellectual attics that have little to do with the life that unfolds on lower floors. Moorhead shows how postmillennial developments within Protestantism undermined the developers in the end. Protestant assertions of thisworldliness and unending progress, along with a waning sense of apocalyptic terror, took away a sense of transcendence as well as of meaningful confrontation with primal human fears. The specter of hell as an eternal night faded. By contrast, the notion of heaven became continuous with the present life, specifically, with the depiction of it as an ideal home. These changes inevitably resulted in a different view of the primary Christian eschatological text—the biblical book of Revelation.
Moorhead’s account adeptly chronicles the ways in which crusading, kingdom-building Protestantism was influenced by what he calls a “secular Great Awakening,” the insight and knowledge available through the new social sciences. Scientific planning, rational organization, business management, professional standards, a preoccupation with efficiency—these replaced theological principles or religious traditions in this new “eschatological” world. Such new measures energized the relentless drive by liberal Protestants in these decades to reshape the nation and the world. The attempt to bring to fruition their liberal vision of the kingdom of God had increasingly little in common with earlier eschatological ideas.
By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, the divide between the progressive heirs of the postmillennial tradition and the conservatives (a.k.a. the fundamentalists) who were watching and waiting for an imminent catastrophic end to history was immense. Moorhead depicts that gap as the contrast between naturalism and supernaturalism. Liberals saw no end in sight; for them the “Second Coming” was a continuous process throughout history. Conservatives anticipated a very different end time scenario; in their scheme, Christ’s physical return was to be instrumental in the denouement of history. Moorhead’s volume is a masterfully written argument for the self-inflicted nature of the mainstream-Protestant wound in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. His work also adds up to a trenchant critique of the mainstream Protestant church as a church of order but of only lukewarm supernaturalism.
Catherine L. Albanese Stephen J. Stein, Series Editors
PREFACE
I N 1907 the British literary critic and essayist Edmund Gosse recalled the moment when he began to lose the faith of his childhood. Alone at school on a summer afternoon, the other students having gone on a walk, Gosse looked out from the schoolhouse upon trees and gardens which sloped down to the sea. “There was,” he wrote, “an absolute silence below and around me; a magic of suspense seemed to keep every topmost twig from waving.” For one reared in a Plymouth Brethren home where he had been taught to await the imminent return of Jesus, the summer stillness was a sign of the End.
Over my soul there swept an immense wave of emotion. Now, surely, now the great final change must be approaching. I gazed up into the tenderly-colored sky, and I broke irresistibly into speech. “Come now, Lord Jesus,” I cried, “come and take me to be for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise....” I waited awhile, watching, and then I felt a faint shame at the theatrical attitude I had adopted, although I was alone. Still I gazed and still I hoped. Then a little breeze sprang up and the branches danced. Sounds began to rise from the road beneath me. Presently the colour deepened, the evening came on. From far below there rose to me the chatter of the boys returning home. The tea bell rang,—last word of prose to shatter my mystical poetry. “The Lord has not come, the Lord will never come,” I muttered, and in my heart the artificial edifice of extravagant faith began to totter and crack. 1
The American Protestants whom this book examines did not experience a tottering and cracking of faith as obvious or as datable as Gosse’s. Unlike him, they did not expect the early return of Jesus. As postmillennialists, they believed that time would have an ultimate closure at the coming of Jesus, but this event would not occur until after the millennium or thousand years of earthly bliss foretold in the twentieth chapter of Revelation. Thus they assumed that the world had yet a long run and that history would in the meantime carry humanity toward ever greater triumphs. Those who held this hope had no reason to surrender it because Jesus failed to return on a particular summer afternoon.
Their hope, however, did totter and crack in other ways. As a distinct biblically grounded eschatology, postmillennialism ebbed away during the decades after the Civil War. In 1859, one writer