William GT Shedd
Shedd, William Greenough Thayer (21 June
1820-17 Nov. 1894), theologian, was born in Acton,
Massachusetts, the son of Marshall Shedd, a Congregational pastor, and Eliza
Thayer, daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant. After graduating from the
University of Vermont in 1839, he taught for a year in New York City and
resolved to enter the ministry. He studied at Andover Theological Seminary, and
following graduation in 1843 he served for two years as pastor of the
Congregational church in Brandon, Vermont. He had been influenced in college by
philosopher James Marsh, absorbing his teachers concern to balance emotion and
reason in religion as well as his interests in Romanticism, the Cambridge
Platonists, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was called back to the university as
professor of English literature in 1845. He was married at that time to Ann
Myers of Whitehall, New York; four children were born of the union.
Shedd's extensive literary knowledge, broadened in his seven years at the
University of Vermont, was displayed in many of his later books, essays, and
sermons, notably in his seven-volume edition of the works of Coleridge (1853).
Andover seminary called him back to teach sacred rhetoric, 1852-1854; then he
became professor of church history at the Presbyterian seminary at Auburn, New
York, where he served for eight years. He returned briefly to pastoral duties at
Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City in 1862 and the next year was named
professor of Bible at nearby Union Theological Seminary, becoming the first
Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature two years later. He followed strictly the
historico-philological method of his Andover teacher Moses Stuart, in which the
precise meaning of the text was sought in its original setting, making use of
new materials from philology and textual criticism.
In 1874 he was transferred to the Roosevelt Professorship of Systematic
Theology, and it was in this role that he is especially remembered. He was
honored for his sincerity, firm convictions, and adherence to truth as he saw
it. As a systematician he was steeped in the patristic, medieval, and
reformation periods and was especially influenced by Augustine and Calvin. His
crowning work was Dogmatic Theology (3 vols., 1888-1894). As a Presbyterian he
became a defender of the Old School position that the whole Bible was inspired
and inerrant, which put him in tension with Unions New School background and its
acceptance of what came to be called the higher criticism, a method of study
that deals with matters of authorship, dates of writing, and original meanings
of the biblical books, using approaches developed by archaeology, literary
criticism, and the history of religion, among others. Though Union Seminary
backed Charles A. Briggs, the leading biblical scholar of the New School, during
the trials that led to his suspension from the Presbyterian ministry in 1893,
Shedd did not; the two colleagues criticized each others views publicly. Shedd
was given emeritus status in 1890 but taught for three more years while his
successor was being sought, until illness made it impossible for him to
continue. He died in New York City.
Shedd's writings were direct, logical, and lucid; for him theology was a
science, understood in Baconian terms, developed from the philosophy of Francis
Bacon into the science-oriented empirical and inductive methods of Enlightenment
thought as interpreted by Scottish commonsense realism. His other well known
works include History of Christian Doctrine (1863), Literary Essays (1878), and
Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy (1893). His later teaching showed an increasing
conservatism. Originally from the Old School branch of his communion before the
reunion of 1869û1870, Shedd increasingly sided with that tradition as developed
at Princeton Seminary under the teachings of Charles Hodge and Benjamin B.
Warfield, and he rejected the higher criticism of the Bible. Some of his works,
in print more than a century after their publication, have been used
particularly by fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals. A versatile,
lucid, prolific scholar, teacher, and writer, Shedd moved away from some of his
earlier literary and philosophical interests as he staunchly defended orthodox
Calvinism in his later work.
His Works