One of the twentieth century’s unsung theologians is receiving new attention, thanks to an online archive recently launched by Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.
Georgia Harkness (1891-1974) was the first woman to hold a full-time chair in theological studies at a Protestant seminary in the United States when she was appointed professor of applied theology at what was then Garrett Biblical Institute in 1939.
Owing to the labors of librarian Daniel Smith and his colleagues, the Styberg Library at Garrett now hosts the Georgia Harkness Digital Collection, which includes 648 letters, sermons, speeches, and other unpublished items. The documents are available in scanned copies (downloadable PDFs) and in transcript and are fully searchable.
I write about Harkness in Tornado God, so I sat down last week to browse the collection. It’s a treasure trove that includes gems beyond those revealed in Rosemary Skinner Keller’s landmark biography, Georgia Harkness: For Such a Time as This (1992).
First, the backstory. Harkness factors into my narrative because of her book The Providence of God (1960), published after she had moved from Garrett to the Pacific School of Religion. Hers was one of a trio of American works on providence that appeared in rapid succession at midcentury. The others were Roger Hazelton’s God’s Way with Man (1956) and William G. Pollard’s Chance and Providence (1958). The books spoke to an anxious age. The 1950s were the era of the Red Scare and Cold War, civil defense drills, polio epidemics, and the emerging fight over civil rights. The decade was also meteorologically violent, with particularly deadly tornadoes in 1953 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Waco, Texas.
In The Providence of God, Harkness wrote that by a “curious twist of legal language, invading the province of theology,” severe storms are called “acts of God.” Is this description true? In an “ultimate sense,” she concluded, it must be; otherwise, something other than God controls the world. At the same time, “we cannot suppose that when the floods and the tornadoes come, God deliberately sends them to smite their victims with the wrath of His displeasure.” We must therefore distinguish between God’s power and God’s purpose. Tornadoes happen by the former but not necessarily by the latter. The world is not a tightly controlled system. God allows for “spontaneity or flexibility or simply the possibility of alternatives.”
In arguing against rigid divine control, Harkness was building on the Boston Personalism of her doctoral mentor Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884-1953). Both explained natural evils (the theologian’s term for destructive natural forces) by appeal to limitations in God, but whereas Brightman saw these limitations as part of God’s inherent nature, Harkness saw them as self-imposed. She made this clear in an earlier work, The Recovery of Ideals (1937), in which she maintained that God is voluntarily limited by inertia and chance in the natural world, by human freedom (which wrongly exercised leads to sin), and by the system of predictable natural laws (which, though good as a whole, produces some outcomes that neither God nor humans may desire).
Today, the idea that God is self-limited has gained popular attention, if not wide acceptance, in the minority evangelical movement known as Open Theism. But in 1960, few American readers had entertained the possibility of divine limitations. Even fewer expected to read a “serious” work of theology by a woman.
These factors contributed to a disappointing reception for Harkness’s Providence of God, as the Garrett digital collection reveals. On November 4, 1960, Harkness wrote to her editor at Abingdon Press, Emory Stephens Bucke, asking why only a handful of reviews had appeared. She was especially incensed that the Christian Century had not reviewed the book (it apparently never did). She wondered if her theological position had put off potential reviewers: “I should not have been surprised to receive bad reviews from the neo-orthodox and the existentialists, since it is not in their mood. But so nearly none, after all these months, is a mystery to me.”
Another reason for the near silence was probably Harkness’s semi-popular writing style. I have long suspected that theologians attain academic prestige in inverse proportion to the accessibility of their prose. Harkness had dedicated her whole career to writing books that were understandable to her fellow Methodists and other laypeople. But this wasn’t the fast track to eminence among the theological cognoscenti. (Though Harkness’s style was more accessible than either Hazelton’s or Pollard’s, all of them were evidently too popular to be cited by the University of Chicago’s Langdon Gilkey in a 1963 article surveying the state of providence in contemporary theology. He instead invoked Europeans like Aulén, Barth, Berdyaev, Brunner, and Bultmann.)
I hope the digital collection at Garrett will begin to give Harkness her due. She deserves an honored place among a minority of twentieth-century Christian thinkers who tried to convey to laypeople what many academic theologians already assumed: that explaining humans’ relationship to the natural world is not a matter of simple biblical proof-texting. The world is more complicated than that.
To bring it back to tornadoes, the legal phrase “act of God” is too ill-defined to capture the complexity, or the mystery, of divine involvement. Harkness was adamant on this point when one of the anonymous reviewers of her Providence of God manuscript commented that she had failed to answer the question, “Why did the tornado hit my house?” Harkness confessed her frustration to her editor: “This query indicates a predestinarian view which the whole book is written to try to refute.”
Harkness was not only a trailblazer for women in theology or a questioner of inherited orthodoxies. She also had enough faith in her lay audience to believe that they too might rethink old assumptions.
Further Reading
Georgia Harkness Papers, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. (Quoted above are letters to Emory Stephens Bucke, 8 May 1959, Series 15, Box 20, Folder 71; and to Emory Stephens Bucke, 4 November 1960, Series 15, Box 20, Folder 124.)
Georgia Harkness, The Providence of God (New York: Abingdon Press, 1960).
Georgia Harkness, The Recovery of Ideals (New York: Scribner’s, 1937).
Rosemary Skinner Keller, Georgia Harkness: For Such a Time as This (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992).
Rebekah Miles, ed., Georgia Harkness: The Remaking of a Liberal Theologian (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). (Harkness appears in chapters 4 and 5.)
Photo of Harkness (above) courtesy of the Pacific School of Religion.
© 2020 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved