After writing my piece comparing Mercersburg Theology with Neo Calvinism, my online-friend Gregory Baus pointed out that the tenets I was describing can be found in the best, if not the whole, of the Presbyterian tradition. As an example, he pointed to Sean Michael Lucas’ definitive biography of Robert Lewis Dabney, specifically his chapter dealing with Dabney’s public theology. Below is a short excerpt from that chapter, of interest to those Presbyterians concerned with cultivating an ancient, “antimodern” faith:
“Dabney’s strong adherence to an older faith placed him closer to antimodernists, who were discovering ancient religions such as Buddhism or rediscovering Catholicism, than to New South Presbyterians, who downplayed their creeds in order to influence Southern Culture….
In a gilded age that made the seemingly impossible possible though unprecedented technological manipulation, antimodernists sought a refuge in otherworldly faiths, which proclaimed a transcendent deity who was shrouded in mystery.
Though most scholars have failed to recognize the possibility that Old School Calvinism—as maintained at Princeton Seminary or defended by Dabney—could be as antimodern as Buddhism or Anglo-Catholicism, for Dabney it appeared that the older faith in a transcendent, sovereign deity both put him out of step with the prevailing modernist spirit of the age and provided resources to challenge the modern age of the Spirit.”
