The Character of God Recovering the Lost Literary Power of American Protestantism

It is a truism that modern theology is mostly dull and irrelevant toreligious life. Only other theologians read it, and even well-educatedChristians use "theological" as a perjorative term, implying that an argument isneedlessly abtruse and beside the point. Indeed, at no other time in the Westhave educated people been so bereft of sophisticated ways to develop and discusstheir religious inclinations.L L Thomas Jenkins maintains that theology becameboring--more precisely, the depiction of God as a character in theology becameboring. To a large extent, argues Jenkins, theologicans have fashioned thecharacter of God according to their own notions of character. These notions, hesays, come from many places, but in the nineteenth-century, theologicans inAmerica were especially strongly influenced by literature. This should not besurprising, Jenkins notes, because imaginative fiction remains one of the mostauthoritative ways to depict personality. Jenkins shows that in the earlynineteenth-century American theologians depicted God according to the dominantliterary styles of the time, resulting in neoclassical and sentimentalcharacterizations. these styles persisted in theology long after they lost favorin the larger culture, where the romantic character had come to be seen as mostadmirable and interesting. The serene benevolence of neoclassicism, and theeffusive sympathy of sentimentalism came to seem corny, flat, and insipid-and sodid the God of theology. Jenkins considers why it proved difficult fortheologians to adopt a romantic characterization of God, and how this hurttheology. Pointing a way out of this impasse, he urges a reassessment ofnineteenth-century romantic theologians like W.G.T. Shedd and Horace Bushnell,and a return to the character of God as found in scripture.