ROUGH DRAFT—NOT FOR CITATION

Originally Published in The Encyclopedia of Protestantism

 Mathews, Shailer

            Shailer Mathews (1863-1941), a leader of liberal Protestantism, was dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago (1908-33), author of over 30 books, social activist, and editor of several periodicals and reference works.

            Mathews was born in Maine to a middle class Baptist family with an evangelical and pietistic heritage.  He graduated from Colby University (1884) and Newton Theological Institution (1887) and taught at Colby (1887-1890) before attending the University of Berlin (1890-93) where he encountered Adolf von Harnack and became committed to liberalism.  He went to University of Chicago in 1894 and remained there until retiring in 1933.

            Mathews was Baptist (licensed, but never ordained, as a Southern Baptist and a president of the Northern Baptist Convention), but his theological work was ecumenical.  His influence dominated the Federal Council of Churches of Christ.

            Because Mathews sought to incorporate critical biblical scholarship and science into theological education, he became a leading modernist in the early twentieth century’s fundamentalist controversies.  (He was on the witness list for the defense at the Scopes Monkey Trial.)  Study of sociology convinced Mathews that Christianity was a social movement distinguished by its practices and not its doctrines.  He rejected the doctrine of the second coming of Christ because he believed that this doctrine undermined the social mission of the church.  Although he was committed to the social gospel, he rejected socialism and advocated altruistic capitalism.

 

References and Further Reading

Mathews, Shailer. Faith of Modernism. New York: Macmillan, 1924.

_____. The Social Teachings of Jesus: An Essay in Christian Sociology. New York:

Macmillan, 1897.

_____. New Faith for Old: An Autobiography of Shailer Mathews. New York:

Macmillan, 1936.

Lindsey, William D. Shailer Mathews’s Lives of Jesus: The Search for a Theological

Foundation for the Social Gospel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

 

Thomas E. Phillips, Colorado Christian University, USA

 

300 words