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Welsh collier who became prominent religious thinker 9/3/2002
A research project on Nonconformity in Wales and America 1860-1920 has led to Dr Densil Morgan of the University of Wales, Bangor’s School of Theology and Religious Studies, to the life of a fascinating Welshman, a self-taught collier who studied theology with the finest minds of his age at Princeton University in America, and who became one of the most notable religious thinkers in 19th century Wales.
Dr Densil Morgan was appointed Visiting Scholar at Princeton in September 2001 – he arrived in the United States a few days after the tragedy of September 11 – and his research focused on a group of young Welsh theologians who studies at the Princeton Theological Seminary, and who came from both Wales and those Welsh communities which were at the time thriving in certain parts of America. Princeton retains it reputation even today as being the premier theological school in the United States, and has lent its name to a branch of theology, ‘the Princeton Theology’, which made a great impact on religion in America.
What is not clear, according to Dr Morgan, is the nature of the effect that the ‘Princeton Theology’ had on religion in Wales, as sixty Calvinistic Methodist ministers from Wales and the Welsh-American communities studied at the seminary and were doubtless influenced by the ideas that were current at the time.
One of those who returned to the home country, and who was the most prominent of the group, was a collier who began working underground aged eight first in Aberdare on the South Wales coalfield and later in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he and his wife emigrated as young people. Even though Rowland Sawel Thomas, better known as R.S.Thomas (not the poet!), received almost no formal education, he took full advantage of his Sunday school and chapel training and became exceedingly well read. He joined in scriptural and theological discussion groups as was the fashion of the age, and was soon publishing scholarly articles on religious topics.
He was enrolled at Princeton – then, as now, one of America’s leading theological colleges – in 1879 straight from the coalmines in a period when many middle class Americans could gain access to a university education. He was, by then 35 tears old, having spent the previous ten years working underground in the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. He obviously made quite an impression on the authorities that they accepted him even though he had virtually no academic background.
He studied at Princeton when the ‘Princeton Theologians’ were at their height, and there is no doubt that their ideas had a pronounced influence on his own thinking. We can imagine him discussing profound matters with his professors who were, in fact, the leading theologians of the day! ‘He was the most widely-read and learned Welsh theologians of his time’, according to Dr Morgan, ‘and he obviously impressed his teachers, people like A.A.Hodge, a man whose name is still revered in religious circles in the United States’.
A glimpse at the everyday life of the student is revealed in his letters, which were made available to Dr Morgan in the seminary’s library. ‘Like students in every age, he called his professors by their nicknames! It’s also obvious from the letters that English was still very much his second language. Despite his undoubted intellectual ability, his sentence structure reveals that he thought in Welsh. It’s intriguing to think of this simple, unsophisticated yet highly able Welsh collier, having to hold his own among the sons of the middle class elite’.
He was a significant figure in the development of Christian thought in Wales. His literary output was prodigious and his contribution to theology quite remarkable. He has been neglected for far too long and deserves to be better known on both sides of the Atlantic’.
R.S.Thomas was ordained into the ministry of the Pennsylvania Presbytery of the Calvinistic Methodist Church in 1882 and spent ten years serving Welsh language congregations in Nanticoke and Taylorville, Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Margaret, had six children all of whom died in their infancy in the United States. They returned home in 1892, and spent the rest of their lives in the Cynon Valley, Glamorganshire. Thomas became an itinerant preacher and published widely on theological topics during the following years. He died, aged 79, in 1923.
Note:
The ‘Princeton Theology’ was a trend in 19th century American Protestantism which placed a great emphasis on the Bible’s authority and on the intellectual aspects of faith. Its appeal was to the mind rather than to the emotions and it tended to be suspicious of religious fervour or enthusiasm. ‘Faith enlightened by reason based on the authority of the Word, these were the characteristics of the Princeton Theology’, according to Dr Morgan.
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