American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

MCGIFFERT, ARTHUR CUSHMAN

(4 March 1861, Sauquoit, NY- 25 February 1933, Dobbs Ferry, NY). Education: B.A., Western Reserve University, 1882; B.D., Union Seminary, NY, 1885; studied at Berlin, 1885- 86; Ph.D., Marburg, 1888. Career: professor, Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, OH, 1888-93; Professor of church history, Union Seminary, 1893-1927; president, Union Seminary, 1917-26; professor emeritus, 1927-33.

Grandson of a Scotch-Irish immigrant, Arthur Cushman McGiffert was one of the foremost leaders of American Christianity during the first third of the twentieth century. He was a controversial, but ultimately highly respected theologian, who came to maturity during the years of conflict between conservatism and modernity in Protestantism.

McGiffert was educated by leading theologians on both sides of the Atlantic. Philip Schaff was one of his teachers at Union, and in Germany he studied under G. Adolph Harnack, the leading historian of German Protestantism. From Harnack, who became a close friend, McGiffert developed an interest in editing and translating ancient Christian documents. In 1897 McGiffert published A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age, an influential study of the early church. Widely respected by modernists, the book was condemned by conservatives, particularly because of a footnote in which McGiffert questioned whether Christ had intended the last supper as a perpetual Christian institution.

At the time McGiffert was a Presbyterian, and he was condemned by several presbyteries and assemblies. To avoid further conflict he withdrew from the church and became a Congregationalist-one indication of the degree to which the church had liberalized since the days when Congregationalists had shunned Horace Bushnell·. During the next three decades McGiffert wrote ten books and more than forty essays on topics as diverse as early Christianity, Martin Luther, and modem Protestant thought. He argued that religious "truth" is so conditioned by time that no creed or doctrine can exist forever. Like the early Pilgrim leader, John Robinson*, he held that "more light"--or at least different forms of light-would continue to influence Christian belief.

McGiffert was drawn to the Social Gospel, believing that Christianity was revealed most compellingly in contemporary social issues. He thought of Jesus as the grand exemplar of the Christian life and saw salvation as a social process. As president of Union Seminary, McGiffert was an effective fund-raiser, and he pioneered a close relationship between Union and Columbia University.

Bibliography
A: A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age (New York, 1897); The Problem of Christian Creeds as Affected by Modern Thought (Buffalo, N.Y., 1901); Martin Luther (New York, 1911); Protestant Thought before Kant (London, 1911; New York, 1962); The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas (New York, 1915); A History of Christian Thought, 2 vols. (New York, 1932); Christianity as History and Faith (New York, 1934).
B: DAB 21, 527-29; DARB, 271-73; NCAB 24, 120; NIT 26 February 1933, 26; SH 7,114.