This chapter shows that biblical criticism encouraged some figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, to abandon what they perceived as transient historical grounds for what they understood as a transcendent moral sphere. Many scholars have stressed the ahistorical aspects of Transcendental belief and emphasized the ways in which Transcendentalism outgrew its Unitarian roots. In doing so, however, they have often neglected to note how historical arguments freed heterodox thinkers such as Emerson and Parker in their attempts to build atemporal worlds. While most biblical scholars used historical readings to ground universal truths in a biblical past, these Transcendentalists employed historical explication to unmoor such truths from that historical setting. The growing perception of historical distance assisted them in that effort. As these and other thinkers drew attention to the shiftiness of historical evidence, the limitations of time, and the remoteness of the past, they exposed the transience of the historical grounds on which American Protetants based their faith.

This chapter shows that thinkers across the antebellum religious spectrum, from Charles Hodge’s orthodox Calvinism to Andrews Norton’s liberal Unitarianism, accepted history as the favored battleground in debates about canon and religious truth. These developments had colonial roots, but flowered in the nineteenth century. Although America’s antebellum biblical scholars responded differently to developments in German biblical criticism, those developments led them to defend their canonical choices with historical arguments, base their hermeneutics in historical analysis, and center their epistemologies in historical knowledge. Even those who rejected aspects of historical interpretation nonetheless recognized the need to address historical readings. Whether in using historical readings or in dismissing them as dangerous or problematic, American biblical interpreters’ efforts highlighted crucial contextual differences between their world and the biblical pasts they looked to for guidance. In short, the stress on historical difference in biblical interpretation introduced a sense of historical distance, which carried with it the threat of questioning the Bible’s relevance.