SOURCE: “Emerson and Christianity,” in Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3-4, Spring, 1998, pp. 221-237.

In the following essay, Bishop examines Emerson's “Divinity School Address” to locate the “Emersonian alternative” to traditional or “historical Christianity.”

Emerson and Christianity could seem almost too vague and ideological a topic to some at least among the current cohort of Americanists. A recent review of research by Lawrence Buell for the Emerson Society Quarterly observes that much recent work has concentrated either upon the youthful or the aging Emerson. To rediscover the comparative orthodoxy of the first or the adaptive Victorianism of the second is in either case to obscure Emerson the Transcendentalist. The influence of newer modes of criticism might also serve to “call into question,” as the phrase goes, the very idea of a central or essential Emerson who might still be identified and confronted. And the monumental...