The contributors whom Annette G. Aubert and Zachary Purvis have brought together in this impressive volume take the study of transatlantic religious history during the long nineteenth century to a new level of analytical sophistication and scholarly rigor. The editors start from the position that the history of modern American Christianity can usefully be approached as the fruit of a histoire croisée in which the Old and New Worlds developed in a two-sided relationship with one another through the movement of ideas, people, and institutional models across the Atlantic. Although several contributors have illuminating things to say about the impact of America on Europe, the main emphasis falls on the extent to which American religious history, as Mark A. Noll remarks in his foreword, “depends on what did not happen in America” (viii).
Central to the volume is the intellectual and religious relationship between nineteenth-century America and Germany. The contributors succeed in drawing new and refreshing axes of interconnection within a well-established field of research. Andrew Kloes demonstrates that the creation of evangelical religious magazines in the United States and Germany functioned as a kind of prehistory to Protestant ecumenism. Andrew Z. Hanson, writing on connections between German and American theology before 1840, analyzes the degree to which relatively conservative American theologians became invested in German “mediating theology,” despite reservations over its orthodoxy, because they found in it an ally against a purely negative form of biblical criticism. The complex triangulations which American theologians tried to make in responding to German historicism are also a leitmotif of Paul E. Kerry's painstaking research into George Bancroft's relationship with Johann Gottfried Eichhorn during his time as a student at Göttingen from 1818 to 1820. On the basis of a deciphering of Bancroft's manuscript notebooks, Kerry mounts a persuasive argument that a scholar sent by relatively conservative Harvard Unitarian mentors to acquaint himself with the weapons of the enemy, ended up assimilating in a way that contributed to his decision to forsake the prospect of a ministerial career in favor of work as an historian. Elizabeth A. Clark's study of the religious and scholarly succor that Philip Schaff extended to his pupil and fellow historian of the early church, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, during and after the latter's studies in Germany, records a more successfully orthodox example of transatlantic religious mentorship.
Although the relationship between America and Germany is fundamental to the volume, one of the book's innovative features is its careful attentiveness to American engagement with other European contexts. Lee C. Barrett and George Harinck extend the volume's frame of reference to encompass Danish and Dutch influences on American theology, respectively. The essays also pose a welcome challenge to unidirectional notions of European influence upon the nineteenth-century United States. David Komline's documentation of August Tholuck's conservative responses to American controversies over his alleged universalism, and Timothy Verhoeven's fascinating exploration of interactions between American and French debates over France's 1905 Law of Separation, document more reciprocal kinds of encounter across the Atlantic.
The editors and contributors to Transatlantic Religion have crafted a volume that admirably historicizes the historical particularity of the nineteenth-century religious world, restoring a large number of today little-known theologians and religious actors to the immediacy of the contexts they shared with figures whose names have remained more familiar to posterity. The essays suggest a range of directions for future inquiry. The role of social science and comparative religion in reworking transnational religious alignments would repay the kind of historicist attention that in these pages is primarily given to the history of theology. So too would more sustained investigation of those aspects of the history of scholarship—such as the development of libraries, syllabuses, and publishing networks—that underpinned or mediated the intellectual history recounted in this volume.
Above all, perhaps, the question of the impact of American or anglophone intellectual and religious history on Continental Europe is one that invites future scholars to venture into an abundant terra incognita. This reversal of the focus of longer-established interest in the question of European, and especially German, influence on Britain and America is one to which several contributors point. In future studies of modern religious history, it is to be hoped that historians will treat the relationship between Europe and the United States in more dynamically double-sided terms than has hitherto been the norm.
