Principios para las matemáticas escolares propuestos por el NCTM

In Founding the Fathers (2011), Elizabeth A. Clark states that academic institution- building in the United States actually coincided with “The creation of early Christian history as a scholarly discipline” (2). She argues that scholars of early Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary took their cues from historical rather than from theological interests. “For these professors,” Clark notes, “the Church Fathers stood on the far side of a great divide that separated ‘inspired’ from ‘uninspired’ books. European scholarship, insofar as it ignored that divide, must be refuted or at least be rendered palatable for American evangelical Protestants” (4). The aim to connect nineteenth-century Christianity in America to its earliest forms through the study of patristics (the writings of the Church Fathers), therefore, must be seen as part of what Schlereth identifies as the telos of the American intelligentsia to construct a unified national past and with it an equally coherent vision of the future (60). The shifting intellectual sensibilities as well as the increasing influx of immigrants in and around the 1830s made achieving such continuity while clinging to exegetical literalism increasingly difficult for Biblical historians. In many ways, these professors sought to derive an original, American Protestant hermeneutic of the Bible from their historical study of patristic literature (meaning the writings of the church fathers).

Initially postulating the New Testament as unaltered and unalterable,24 [. . .] professors—gradually and often reluctantly—came to concede that as

historians, they could not privilege the New Testament as a static and untouchable divine revelation, exempt from scrutiny by the historical-critical methods applied to other ancient literatures. Only then could New Testament and patristic literature be linked as sources for the development of early Christianity. Second, the

traditional Protestant assumption that the early church had suffered grievous decline between the apostolic and the Reformation eras collided with theories of historical development that encouraged a more sympathetic assessment of early and medieval Christianity and a cautious celebration of difference among ethnic groups. (Clark 5)

Clark’s assessment invokes issues of textual fluidity that I will address in a moment. The professors’ agenda was anything but disinterested, as they assumed, a priori, a corruption narrative, beginning with an “early decline” after the second century that had been the genesis for Protestantism and its valiant struggle against deviant version of Christianity (Clark 343). Another insight to be gained from this passage is that we must not restrict our gaze to the

fledgling universities when trying to answer the question who was engaging with higher Biblical criticism in early nineteenth-century America. These institutions by no means represented the full spectrum of methodological opinions, nor did they house all public intellectuals of repute. Answering the ‘European challenge’ was a decidedly decentralized affair. What is more, many orthodox commentators understood all too well that engaging these challenges on the basis of evidentialism could yield unforeseen results and potential threaten established doctrines.

In his holy-land journal, Melville himself pondered the potentially detrimental effects the new technique can have on personal faith and even curses Reinhold Niebuhr and David Friedrich Strauß for having “robbed us of the bloom” (Journals 97). While no friend of dogmatism, he

24 _{This project of constructing a distinct, non-European past finds its echoes in other cultural arenas as well.}

It is reinforced in the politics behind Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. In literature, William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The Prairies” (1832), in which the speaker contemplates the sense of historical implications invoked by the vistas of the American landscape, is a prominent example of the a growing trend among Americans of Anglo- Saxon descent to construct a mythical American antiquity that predated the American Indian nation tribes.

equally resents the disillusioning properties of unfettered critical analysis in this moment of spiritual crisis: “The deuce take their penetration and acumen. [. . ..] If they have undeceived any one—no thanks to them” (Journals 97). The note allows some insight into how Melville thought about the utility of Biblical fiction and its comforting ability to connect the individual with a sacred history. At the same time, intellectual earnestness, a strong Victorian value and a

pervasive theme in his writing, does not allow the individual seeking the moral good of truth to forego the evidence presented by the historical criticism of the Bible. Henry Adams recalls the atmosphere at Harvard College in Cambridge, with learned Unitarian professors advocating virtue as a quality sufficient for salvation (Turner 85). I will elaborate on how he copes with this dilemma in my analysis chapters.25

Meanwhile, Brown has the conflict between liberal and orthodox theologians in the early nineteenth-century United States play out predominantly between Andover Seminary on the conservative side and Harvard Divinity School on the side of the (Unitarian) progressives (8). Of course, this delineation of camps is reductive in the sense that many American theologians that did not openly participate in these discussions may have struggled privately with some of the questions I outline in the following; yet Brown’s scheme is a useful baseline for getting a sense of the methodological landscape of American Biblical scholarship in the early nineteenth century, when Melville was to begin his literary career.

One of the most energetic young preachers and a liberal theologian in early nineteenth- century Boston, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, addressed the omnipresent specter of backsliding

25 _{At this point in his career, Melville had suffered a nervous breakdown, allegedly as a result of his}

unsuccessful attempts at literary fame as a novelist. This dynamic becomes a crucial trope in most of his fiction and poetry, specifically in Clarel, as I will show below. As a point of comparison, Melville’s most well-known use of the word “undeceive,” designating an ideology unraveled, occurs in the poem “Shilo” in Battle-Pieces. Here, the speaker reflects on the demystifying effect of death as an egalitarian force in warfare that obliterates ideological glorification: “what like a bullet can undeceive” (PP 46). Melville’s usage of the verb in both instances connotes a forceful stripping away of the individual’s ideological insulation and a subsequent violent exposure to an unpleasant truth.

and ‘atheism’ when he remarked to his congregation that deism and skepticism had arisen partially because serious historical scholarship on the Bible had been neglected in America for too long (Brown 18). In his sermon on the source of infidelity (1829), Buckminster sketched out the slippery slope that lead believers reared on dogma alone from Calvinism to doubt to atheism. Such backsliding, he argued, could only be counteracted through a native form of historical study of Scripture. Buckminster sought to disprove the orthodox dogmatism and place NT Christianity on a firmer foundation, and he labored under the conviction that pursuing Biblical criticism would ultimately produce a “purer and more defensible faith” (Brown 25). “To a great extent,” Brown notes, “the development of biblical studies in America may be traced by following those who had come into Buckminster’s sphere of influence, either personally or through the scattered treasures of his library” (29).

Ministerial training constituted the main focus of the first American colleges and was arguably the reason why they never produced the same scientific atmosphere found at European centers of learning at the time. The first graduate program was only to be initiated at Johns Hopkins University in 1876. Hence methodological training in advanced critical techniques was reserved for those young men of means to travel and often proceeded to European institutions, which took a decidedly less reverent approach to the Biblical text: “Nineteenth-century German scholarship in the universities had been freed from church control. Indebted to Immanuel Kant’s philosophical distinction between the real and phenomenal worlds, German scholars in many fields were dedicated to understanding the real world through rigorous logical analysis of observed phenomena” (Brown 38). George Bancroft, who received a stipend from Harvard to study in Germany in 1813, wrote to his mentors that the higher criticism could not deter his piety: “I never heard anything like moral or religious feeling manifested in their theological

lectures. They neither begin with God or go on with him [. . .]” (qtd. in Brown 43). The

cultivation of personal piety and religious sentiment entered into a much greater degree into the American ministerial education. After all, the training was much more practically minded as young ministers, following their training at the seminary, often had to venture to remote congregations where they competed for the moral constituency of their flock against (illiterate) itinerant preachers of the George Whitefield type and against a confident attitude of their flock towards their own exegetical capabilities. Thus the emphasis on pulpit performance in order to ‘win over’ audiences contrasted the detached academic air of intellectual theological debate found in Germany. True, Europe too had its fair share of charismatic preachers, but the

crystallization of higher criticism as a distinct discourse had progressed farther than in America. As Brown notes, “American biblical studies had never been firmly established as an independent intellectual tradition. The methods, techniques, and problems of biblical study were derived from the German academic community and placed in the context of American church life” (180-81). Hence there was virtually no equivalent to this kind of critical discourse; rather, skeptics came under attack in the debates about morality and the implication of religion as a moralizing agent for citizenship in the United States.

On the conservative end of the spectrum, Moses Stuart, the head of Andover seminary, loomed large. Conservative scholars—the label is somewhat misleading here, since Stuart did critically engage the new teachings as opposed to many of his colleagues who outright dismissed them—of Stuart’s stripe took a philological approach to Biblical interpretation, which Brown calls a “grammatico-historical interpretation,” that relied on a contextual, grammatical analysis of the extant Biblical text (52). Stuart was one of the few conservatives who took seriously the challenge of higher criticism, yet he saw it as a potentially unifying agent that could alleviate

sectarian divisions and unify American Christians (Brown 49, 51). This hope was based on the assumption that the Bible was an inspired text that revealed the Word of God. Given these preliminaries, Stuart naturally expected any rigorous analysis to ultimately demonstrate the unity of truth revealed in the text. This view increasingly seemed anachronistic at a time in which the various editorial processes behind the Bible’s composition became better understood. These findings revealed the Biblical text not only to be man-made but also as more of an anthology than a cohesive narrative. Furthermore, inquiry was always to be tempered by piety. As Brown notes, Stuart never reconciled the problematic contradiction between his belief in Biblical textual unity, derived from New England Protestant theology, and the concept of progressive revelation. From German neology, Stuart adopted the idea that God revealed Himself to humankind through history (58). Another major difference between German and American, or rather American liberal and orthodox, scholarship was that German neology investigated the historical life of the whole biblical text, while American orthodox scholars largely ignored the OT because they saw it authorized only by its foreshadowing and confirming the events and doctrines relayed in the NT. In fact this was true for many believers at the time. Turner reminds us that, “most Americans appear to have remained unshaken in their conviction of the Bible’s historical veracity. Even theologians and Biblical scholars did not attend much to higher criticism until late in the century” (150).26

Again, it would be wrong to see this avoidance as simple ignorance or intellectual cowardice on the part of the orthodox. On the contrary, conservative commentators may have realized that their disagreements with their liberal brethren as well as with the more radical branches of the religious spectrum would ultimately be leveled. In 1824 conservative Edward

26 _{Coogan summarizes that the wisdom books, the Ketuvim (writings), in the Hebrew Bible were “a}

Robinson looked back over the controversy about textual criticism with amusement. His reaction indicates that the religious orthodoxy had silently acceded to the argument from history over time. Lee speculates that, “Repeated exposure blunted the radical edge of claims that were once considered heretical” and subsumes that “In the nineteenth century, conservative Christians were making concessions regarding the status of Holy Writ that their parents could never have

imagined” (138). Besides gradual erosion of the opposition, Michael Lee also cites the changed status of history and historical techniques:

One reason the orthodox conceded the argument was that for decades, history had been one of the strongest weapons in the arsenal of the Christians against the deists and skeptics. In eighteenth-century America, liberals, Calvinists, and skeptics all grew to trust history as an independent arbiter of truth. All sides often turned to the evidence of history to assert their points. Skeptics believed that history could reveal the contradictions and flaws of the Bible. Christians, in turn, defended revelation using history. (138)

Ultimately, however, Brown subsumes, there was no open rigorous conflict on methodological practice. A willful lack of interest in the new developments within the scholarly discipline of theology combined with an a priori privileging of the accessibility of Christianity by common sense created an atmosphere in the American academy and beyond in which methodological debate about exegesis seemed moot:

[. . .] German neology failed in America not because of brilliant orthodox defense, but rather because of lack of interest; the great battle among American religious parties was waged in the pulpit rather than in the classroom. The mass of

Americans were more readily led to accept the authority of the Bible by rhetoric than by logic. Time and again Stuart stated that the truths of the Bible were so explicit that any man of common sense could understand them and grasp the principles of interpretation which would authenticate them. Since the truths of the Bible were so obvious, it could easily seem a work of supererogation to master biblical languages and read extensively the arid productions of continental scholars. (Brown 110)

As the liberal movement thus flamed out, George R. Noyse tried to mediate between two approaches that distinguished layperson from expert readers. For one thing, he rejected the

notion of progressive revelation that Stuart’s camp promoted. While natural reason was God’s greatest gift to humankind, revealed religion must be added to those natural faculties in order to find true religion (Brown 135). Both revelations, natural and direct (supernatural) had always been clear and consistent. Over time, however, human beings had conflated the products of natural reason and revealed truth in their study of the Bible; hence for Noyse, “The problem for the nineteenth-century Christian was to separate the unchangeable truths of revelation from the human accretions in which they were embodied” (Brown 135). Despite Noyse’s best efforts, liberal interest in the historical method of Biblical analysis was already declining by the 1850s.

Subsequent liberal scholars, such as Theodore Parker, tried to integrate humankind’s rational faculties with their conception of religion by characterizing such faculties as means to certify intuitive religion through a rational vocabulary (Brown 170). But these voices lacked the radical edge of, say, the deist insurgents to incite actual meaningful debate on the point. Still, the nineteenth-century controversies, limited as their scope had been, influenced Biblical exegesis. They therefore were part of a larger shift in religious thinking. Ultimately, as Lee shows, these debates made it so that appeals to supernatural inspiration in interpreting the Bible waned among ministers towards the end of the nineteenth century (Erosion 88).27