David F. Holland: Minerva and Muse, Pain and Imperfection, and an Abundance of Revelation

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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I believe. Any account of my belief will necessarily be partial, as it derives from many sources, some of which lie beyond my powers of expression. I cannot do much more here than touch on a few constitutive elements of my faith.

Some of my conviction draws from historical women and men whose thinking I find compelling and whose impact on the world I admire. Some of it is fueled by the theologies of those who mean the most to me. And some rests on my own revelatory encounters with a God I love.

I start here with a pair of historical thinkers whose ideas have enriched my belief. Their sense of how one should search for divine light seems particularly appropriate for a volume on thoughtful faith.

Minerva and Muse

When the nineteenth-century Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller sought to capture the combination of traits that constituted a woman’s full world-altering power, she picked two figures from Roman mythology: Minerva and Muse. The warrior goddess Minerva represented a being confident in her own independent capacity for reason and discernment. Muse signified poetic intuitions, a soul attuned to “joyous inspiration” and “incessant revelation.” Fuller came to believe that these two personae, Minerva and Muse, lay within all of us and that they need to be harmonized for the sake of our own souls and for the flourishing of the world around us. Fuller’s remarkable life flowed out from her conviction that the combination of spiritual inspiration and independent thinking—however tumultuous their union—would ultimately lead us into the redemptive power of eternal truth.

Fuller’s Transcendentalist contemporary, Theodore Parker, invoked a somewhat similar set of complementary principles in his search for true religious faith. He shared Fuller’s conviction that many of the most important truths about human existence could be felt intuitively, springing naturally from the divine elements of the human conscience. He also believed that these flashes of light come to us rough-hewn and in need of refinement. To be a lasting source of illumination, Parker held, our spiritual insights must wrestle honestly with the discoveries of science and history and the demands of hard thinking. Lives of faith start with the inspirations of the soul, he insisted, but only those intuited truths that could survive testing and scrutiny, research and review, were worthy to be called true. Our hearts provide the ore, our minds the refining fire.

Though they had different ways of describing the process of soul formation, Fuller and Parker each offered an account of human faith that required a combination of spontaneous spiritual creativity and critical thinking. Both believed this dialectical process led to a God of beauty and goodness and a world of greater justice. If either part of this pairing were allowed to overwhelm the other, they contended, we would surely fall short of the divinity for which we had been designed. The ennobling interplay of inspiration and reasoning requires our very best effort to nourish both capacities.

When I reflect on human history, the sorts of lives I most admire and the kinds of contributions I most want to emulate seem to rest on a balanced commitment to these two elements. The fact that Fuller and Parker developed into truly courageous champions of what I consider to be profoundly righteous causes (abolition, women’s rights, civil liberty) strikes me as very weighty evidence in support of their theologies.

Pain and Imperfection

The impact of ideas like Margaret Fuller’s and Theodore Parker’s on my own understanding of a life of thoughtful faith has been profound. And yet, I radically part company with them on a number of key issues. For one, though they were aware of the message of the restoration, they chose not to embrace it, whereas I believe that the restored gospel is God’s ultimate instrument for the redemptive gathering of his children. Relatedly, their thoughtful faith led them away from a sense of dependence on the grace of Jesus Christ whereas mine seems to bring me ever more fully into that core Christian truth. I have thought a lot about how and why I differ from them on this question of atonement. I have concluded that it has everything to do with the key concepts of two theologians who exercise even more influence on my thinking.