Augustus Hopkins Strong And His Journey Toward Ethical Monism -- By: Brandon Wilkins

Journal: Reformed Baptist Theological Review
Volume: RBTR 04:2 (Jul 2007)
Article: Augustus Hopkins Strong And His Journey Toward Ethical Monism
Author: Brandon Wilkins


Augustus Hopkins Strong And His Journey Toward Ethical Monism

Brandon Wilkins*

* Brand Wilkins is a M.Div. student at The Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies, Westminster Theological Seminary in California, Escondido, CA.

The Twentieth Century was a time in the history of the church when the theological pendulum swung with great frequency and ferocity between the poles of hyper-immanence and hyper-transcendence. Stanley Grenz and Roger Olsen have argued that the theologies produced in that period (neo-orthodoxy, liberation, narrative, among others) revealed the “instability” that necessarily follows from emphasizing one side of the “pendulum swing” to the exclusion of the other.1 The challenge of finding equilibrium between transcendence and immanence is not new. It has existed since the early days of the church and is, arguably, the over-arching challenge of western philosophy. Despite attempts to balance or correct the pendulum swing, the modern period particularly emphasized immanence over transcendence and brought with it a host of theological challenges.

While Baptists generally did not play a prominent role in such debates, we should not conclude that no Baptists were engaged in the task of making sense of the cultural and theological milieu of the times. Indeed, several could be named. We will consider one in particular, Augustus Hopkins Strong. Strong was an erudite and thorough scholar, well-read in theology and philosophy. In him we meet a theologian at the dawn of the Twentieth Century wrestling with the problem of transcendence and immanence in light of the models, developments, and trajectories of his day–both good and bad. This article will survey Strong’s life and theological career, taking special note of how he interpreted the problem of transcendence and immanence.2 Upon

surveying Strong’s interpretation (called “ethical monism”) a brief analysis will be offered from a covenantal perspective. My primary objective is simply to reveal the life-long journey by which he arrived at his theological conclusions.3

Perhaps it is useful to provide a brief description of Strong’s ethical monism. In the mid to late 1890s, Strong published a series of essays which were compiled into the classic work Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism (1899). In this work Strong advocated a view of the God-world relationship which posited a radically immanent Christ. Strong spoke of the world as constituting “the thought of Christ.”

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