264 Roberts
entists on one side and partisans of dogmatic theology on the other. Still,
the distinction that he made between doctrinal theology and experiential
religion exemplifi ed a strategy that became increasingly common among
liberal Christians, including many scientists, in the United States and
Great Britain during the half century after 1890. That distinction enabled
its proponents to detach the power and meaning of religion from its abil-
ity to provide an understanding of the natural world. It also allowed them
to concede the realm of cognitive claims regarding natural phenomena
to people who specialized in the sciences without feeling that in so do-
ing, they were fatally weakening the position of religion. Noting that the
primary meaning and value of religion lay in its “power to release faith
and courage for living, to produce spiritual vitality and fruitfulness; and
by that she ultimately stands or falls,” Harry Emerson Fosdick emphasized
that Christians possess a “standing- ground and a message” independent
of the verdict of science. Although it was important “not to be unscien-
tifi c,” it was fatuous to assume that “the highest compliment that could be
paid to Almighty God was that a few scientists believed in him.”^23
Liberals may have recognized that the realm of doctrine constituted
the source of most of the diffi culties Christians had in relating their world-
view to scientifi c inquiry, but few of them wanted to dispense with theol-
ogy altogether. They therefore redoubled their efforts to demarcate ap-
propriate boundaries between that discipline and science. Proponents of
the idea that “religious experience” rather than efforts to explain natural
phenomena lay at the heart of the religious impulse reasoned that “theo-
logical knowledge is founded in experience as really as physical science
is.” From this perspective, some thinkers concluded that the primary bond
linking religion and science lay in a common commitment to a rigor-
ously empirical methodology, increasingly called the “scientifi c method.”
A forthright expression of this approach appeared in the work of liberal
theologians who espoused what they called “empirical theology.” In 1919
one of the most well- known proponents of that position, the Yale theolo-
gian Douglas Clyde Macintosh, published a work demanding that theol-
ogy itself “become genuinely scientifi c.” Macintosh maintained that just
as practitioners of “the empirical sciences assume the existence, and the
possibility of empirical knowledge, of the objects they undertake to inves-
tigate,” so theologians were entitled to “posit the existence of God” and
then use the data of religious experience to discern in more detail “just
what attributes and relations can be ascribed to that religious Object.”
Shailer Mathews, a liberal who served as dean of the University of Chi-
cago Divinity School, did not place himself within the camp of empirical
theologians, but he did defi ne the “modernist” version of evangelicalism