PROF. GEORGE ALBERT10 COE, PhD, LLD (Rev. George W.9, Ezra8, Jesse7, Jesse6, Capt. David5, Capt. Joseph4, Capt. John3, Robert2, Robert1), was born into a Methodist parsonage on March 26, 1862, in Mendon, Monroe County, in western New York. He was the son of the Rev. George W. Coe and Harriet Van Voorhis to whom also a daughter, Hattie, was born.
The Genesse Annual Conference within which Reverend Coe served was called "the burnt-over district" by the nineteenth century revivalist, Charles Finney. Finney was referring to the intensity with which successive generations of Methodist circuit riders preached a fiery rhetoric of judgment and salvation throughout the region. Throughout Coe's boyhood, evangelical fervor and millennial and perfectionist enthusiasms kept the Genesse Annual Conference in turmoil.
Coe wrote only briefly of his family but his scattered references suggest a family lacking in easy intimacy, a family in which the emotive piety of the mother softened somewhat the doctrinal orthodoxy of the father. Coe enjoyed the rural settings of his family's parsonages, developing a life-long love of the out-of-doors.
In 1884, at eighteen, Coe left home to enter the University of Rochester, a church-related college in the style of the mid-nineteenth century. Coe began his college years without "an inward testimony" of his salvation. But since his own father had not experienced a conversion until his twentieth year that was not initially a problem. Despite Coe's fervent prayers, the first years of college passed without his experiencing anything. Coe's description of this time is exceptionally brief, but it does convey how deeply he yearned for certitude. The quest ended when Coe made a conscious decision to ask no longer for the spiritual certainty that eluded him. Resolutely putting to one side the question of whether or not he had been accepted by God, Coe committed his life to "the Christian way." Breaking with the tradition of his church and his family, Coe counted himself a Christian on the basis of his own ethical decision.
His second commitment was inspired by his biology teacher who held up to his students the meticulous care with which Darwin organized his empirical data to support his hypothesis in "The Origin of Species" (1859). One Sunday morning, Coe solemnly espoused the scientific method vowing to follow it wherever it might lead, thus joining the ranks of those who in increasing numbers were finding their security in methods of inquiry, of observation, of experience, or forming and following hypotheses.
After graduation from Rochester and still looking forward to a career in ministry, Coe began a three year divinity course at Methodist-related Boston University. At Boston, he made a third commitment that would be decisive for his future: he turned away from theology and toward philosophy and he shifted his career goal from minister to professor. His philosophy professor was Borden Parker Bowne who, until his death in 1910, was the foremost philosopher within American Methodism. From Bowne, Coe learned to think of natural processes and religion itself as under law and yet at the same time to think of them under categories of freedom and personality. Bowne taught that personality was the only reality in the universe. He declared that the universe itself finally is "immaterial, conscious and personal."
Bowne's personalism was a life-long legacy which Coe modified but never repudiated. Coe received an STB in 1887. He stayed another year studying philosophy under Bowne and received an MA in 1888. Boston awarded him a PhD in 1891 and the same year honored him with Joseph Sleeper Traveling Fellowship.
What he later called "his word of destiny" came to him in 1886 when he met Sadie E. Knowland of Alameda, CA. They were married on September 3, 1888, and spent the next two years at the University of Southern California (USC), where Coe held what he called "a humble post" teaching philosophy.
They married with mutual understanding of his wife's ambition to have a career in music and Coe wrote that neither of them for a moment regretted it. "To work side by side in our respective profession," he wrote, "seemed to us to be at once destiny and duty and highest happiness." Both had yearned to study abroad and were elated when Coe won the traveling fellowship.
They decided to go to Berlin, Germany, where George Albert studied at the University of Berlin and Sadie found teachers who developed her talents as a pianist and her interests in music theory.
Coe was thirty years old when he completed his formal studies at Berlin in 1892. He was by then a liberal Protestant affirming no creed but fully committed to central principles coming from the eighteenth century Enlightenment.
Although liberal theology was a protean movement, it had a common core. The three root principles that gave liberalism coherence were continuity, autonomy and dynamism. The principle continuity enabled liberals to reject the ancient distinctions between the human and the divine, Christianity and other religions, the sacred and the secular, the individual and society and the natural and the supernatural. The principle of autonomy led liberals to reject any arbitrary appeal to external authority.
Believing that since the Enlightenment human beings had "come of age," the liberals celebrated the autonomous reason, which now became the judge of all things including the truths traditionally verified by revelation. The third principle was dynamism. Influenced by Hegel, the new theology was characterized by a dynamic view of God's revelation in history. Progressive revelation now became the norm in interpreting the Bible and liberals increasingly adopted a perspective in which all theological formulations were seen as tentative.
Coe's own life experiences made him perceptive to these principles. Both his commitment to science and evolutionary theory, and his commitment to Bowne's idealist personalism reinforced his own understanding of continuity as a root principle in both nature and religion. The continuity of religious growth from childhood to adolescence to adulthood would become a hallmark of his teachings.
The centrality of autonomy in Coe's life is well expressed in an autobiographical sketch where he wrote that his rejection of theological orthodoxy was occasioned by theology's fallacious view of authority and was only the beginning of his heterodoxy. In time he would question economic, social and political orthodoxies of all kinds.
The Inauguration of Professor George Albert Coe, PhD, LLD, as Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology took place on Tuesday evening, November 16, 1909, at eight-fifteen o'clock, in the Adams Chapel. The procession, consisting of the Seminary Choir, the Directors and Faculty of the Seminary, and representatives of neighboring seminaries, entered the chapel during the organ voluntary by Dr. Gerrit Smith, the Musical Director of the Seminary. The Lord's Prayer was repeated, followed by the Chant "Venite, Exultemus Domino." The Rev. Professor William Adams Brown, PhD., DD, read the Scripture Lesson, from Ephesians iv., and the choir sang, as an anthem, the "Magnificat" by Garrett.
The President of the Board of Directors, Robert C. Ogden, LLD, made the following statement: "On the 20th of April, 1909, the Board of Directors of the Union Theological Seminary, by unanimous vote, elected Professor George Albert Coe, PhD, LLD, Professor of Philosophy in Northwestern University, to the Skinner and McAlpin Chair of Practical Theology. Professor Coe has accepted, and has already taken up his work here."
Coe's life-long openness to dynamism was both an intellectual commitment and an expression of his own optimistic temperament. He lived through the first half of the twentieth century and nothing in that tumultuous period, neither the totalitarianisms of the right nor the left, nor the destruction wrought by two world wars, changed his ebullient confidence that the conscience of modernity was being sensitized to ever higher values in an ongoing historical process that he believed was profoundly religious.
From 1892 to 1927, Coe taught at three institutions: Northwestern University (1892-1909) in Evanston, IL, and two institutions in New York City, Union Theological Seminary (1909-1922) and Teachers College, Columbia University (1922-1927).
He joined Northwestern's faculty with teaching responsibility in the fields of philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, the same responsibilities John Dewey held at the University of Chicago from 1894-1904. When Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904, he taught principally in the area of philosophy. When Coe left Northwestern his focus shifted to psychology and pedagogy; and, later in 1922 when he moved to Teachers College, his primary focus was pedagogy. But these shifting foci were for Coe a part of a larger whole within which he understood the meaning of religious education. Like Dewey, Coe considered philosophy to be a general theory of education.
Professor Coe's first important contribution was a book entitled "The Spiritual Life." This was published in 1900. Like the previous studies of Starbuck and of Leuba it was chiefly concerned with the religious conversion experience. It differed from Starbuck's important study in the fact that it was not wholly dependent upon the answers to questionnaires. Coe had dealt with his subjects personally and had subjected them to various tests with special reference to temperament and suggestibility.
Prof. Coe was a member of the American Psychological Association and of the American Philosophical Association. He was president for 1909-1910 of the Religious Education Association. He was a copious contributor to philosophical, theological, and educational magazines.
The death of George Albert Coe in Claremont, CA, on November 9, 1951, reminds us of the important movement for the study of the psychology of religion in which he had a leading part at the turn of the century. Among the first in the field was James H. Leuba, who in 1896 published a doctor's thesis dealing with the religious conversion experience. This was three years before Edwin Starbuck's Psychology of Religion, but as early as Dr. Starbuek had read a paper before the Indiana College Association which foreshadowed his later work. Stanley Hall was also a leading spirit in the movement and his "Journal of Religions Psychology and Education" became its movement important vehicle. William James brought the movement to a brilliant climax with the publication of his "Varieties of Religious Experience." Two important European representatives were Theodore Flournoy of Geneva, and Henri Delacroit of Paris.
Coe left his private papers to Yale Divinity School. A portion of these papers, primarily letters and seminary minutes bearing upon his resignation in 1922 from Union Theological Seminary, were closed to scholars until 1977 at Coe's request. Coe's correspondence is filed in folders according to year. Since Coe's style, even in private letters, was always impersonal and reticent, these letters give little information beyond what is more readily available in his books and articles. - Who's Who in America
The Genesse Annual Conference within which Reverend Coe served was called "the burnt-over district" by the nineteenth century revivalist, Charles Finney. Finney was referring to the intensity with which successive generations of Methodist circuit riders preached a fiery rhetoric of judgment and salvation throughout the region. Throughout Coe's boyhood, evangelical fervor and millennial and perfectionist enthusiasms kept the Genesse Annual Conference in turmoil.
Coe wrote only briefly of his family but his scattered references suggest a family lacking in easy intimacy, a family in which the emotive piety of the mother softened somewhat the doctrinal orthodoxy of the father. Coe enjoyed the rural settings of his family's parsonages, developing a life-long love of the out-of-doors.
In 1884, at eighteen, Coe left home to enter the University of Rochester, a church-related college in the style of the mid-nineteenth century. Coe began his college years without "an inward testimony" of his salvation. But since his own father had not experienced a conversion until his twentieth year that was not initially a problem. Despite Coe's fervent prayers, the first years of college passed without his experiencing anything. Coe's description of this time is exceptionally brief, but it does convey how deeply he yearned for certitude. The quest ended when Coe made a conscious decision to ask no longer for the spiritual certainty that eluded him. Resolutely putting to one side the question of whether or not he had been accepted by God, Coe committed his life to "the Christian way." Breaking with the tradition of his church and his family, Coe counted himself a Christian on the basis of his own ethical decision.
His second commitment was inspired by his biology teacher who held up to his students the meticulous care with which Darwin organized his empirical data to support his hypothesis in "The Origin of Species" (1859). One Sunday morning, Coe solemnly espoused the scientific method vowing to follow it wherever it might lead, thus joining the ranks of those who in increasing numbers were finding their security in methods of inquiry, of observation, of experience, or forming and following hypotheses.
After graduation from Rochester and still looking forward to a career in ministry, Coe began a three year divinity course at Methodist-related Boston University. At Boston, he made a third commitment that would be decisive for his future: he turned away from theology and toward philosophy and he shifted his career goal from minister to professor. His philosophy professor was Borden Parker Bowne who, until his death in 1910, was the foremost philosopher within American Methodism. From Bowne, Coe learned to think of natural processes and religion itself as under law and yet at the same time to think of them under categories of freedom and personality. Bowne taught that personality was the only reality in the universe. He declared that the universe itself finally is "immaterial, conscious and personal."
Bowne's personalism was a life-long legacy which Coe modified but never repudiated. Coe received an STB in 1887. He stayed another year studying philosophy under Bowne and received an MA in 1888. Boston awarded him a PhD in 1891 and the same year honored him with Joseph Sleeper Traveling Fellowship.
What he later called "his word of destiny" came to him in 1886 when he met Sadie E. Knowland of Alameda, CA. They were married on September 3, 1888, and spent the next two years at the University of Southern California (USC), where Coe held what he called "a humble post" teaching philosophy.
They married with mutual understanding of his wife's ambition to have a career in music and Coe wrote that neither of them for a moment regretted it. "To work side by side in our respective profession," he wrote, "seemed to us to be at once destiny and duty and highest happiness." Both had yearned to study abroad and were elated when Coe won the traveling fellowship.
They decided to go to Berlin, Germany, where George Albert studied at the University of Berlin and Sadie found teachers who developed her talents as a pianist and her interests in music theory.
Coe was thirty years old when he completed his formal studies at Berlin in 1892. He was by then a liberal Protestant affirming no creed but fully committed to central principles coming from the eighteenth century Enlightenment.
Although liberal theology was a protean movement, it had a common core. The three root principles that gave liberalism coherence were continuity, autonomy and dynamism. The principle continuity enabled liberals to reject the ancient distinctions between the human and the divine, Christianity and other religions, the sacred and the secular, the individual and society and the natural and the supernatural. The principle of autonomy led liberals to reject any arbitrary appeal to external authority.
Believing that since the Enlightenment human beings had "come of age," the liberals celebrated the autonomous reason, which now became the judge of all things including the truths traditionally verified by revelation. The third principle was dynamism. Influenced by Hegel, the new theology was characterized by a dynamic view of God's revelation in history. Progressive revelation now became the norm in interpreting the Bible and liberals increasingly adopted a perspective in which all theological formulations were seen as tentative.
Coe's own life experiences made him perceptive to these principles. Both his commitment to science and evolutionary theory, and his commitment to Bowne's idealist personalism reinforced his own understanding of continuity as a root principle in both nature and religion. The continuity of religious growth from childhood to adolescence to adulthood would become a hallmark of his teachings.
The centrality of autonomy in Coe's life is well expressed in an autobiographical sketch where he wrote that his rejection of theological orthodoxy was occasioned by theology's fallacious view of authority and was only the beginning of his heterodoxy. In time he would question economic, social and political orthodoxies of all kinds.
The Inauguration of Professor George Albert Coe, PhD, LLD, as Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology took place on Tuesday evening, November 16, 1909, at eight-fifteen o'clock, in the Adams Chapel. The procession, consisting of the Seminary Choir, the Directors and Faculty of the Seminary, and representatives of neighboring seminaries, entered the chapel during the organ voluntary by Dr. Gerrit Smith, the Musical Director of the Seminary. The Lord's Prayer was repeated, followed by the Chant "Venite, Exultemus Domino." The Rev. Professor William Adams Brown, PhD., DD, read the Scripture Lesson, from Ephesians iv., and the choir sang, as an anthem, the "Magnificat" by Garrett.
The President of the Board of Directors, Robert C. Ogden, LLD, made the following statement: "On the 20th of April, 1909, the Board of Directors of the Union Theological Seminary, by unanimous vote, elected Professor George Albert Coe, PhD, LLD, Professor of Philosophy in Northwestern University, to the Skinner and McAlpin Chair of Practical Theology. Professor Coe has accepted, and has already taken up his work here."
Coe's life-long openness to dynamism was both an intellectual commitment and an expression of his own optimistic temperament. He lived through the first half of the twentieth century and nothing in that tumultuous period, neither the totalitarianisms of the right nor the left, nor the destruction wrought by two world wars, changed his ebullient confidence that the conscience of modernity was being sensitized to ever higher values in an ongoing historical process that he believed was profoundly religious.
From 1892 to 1927, Coe taught at three institutions: Northwestern University (1892-1909) in Evanston, IL, and two institutions in New York City, Union Theological Seminary (1909-1922) and Teachers College, Columbia University (1922-1927).
He joined Northwestern's faculty with teaching responsibility in the fields of philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, the same responsibilities John Dewey held at the University of Chicago from 1894-1904. When Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904, he taught principally in the area of philosophy. When Coe left Northwestern his focus shifted to psychology and pedagogy; and, later in 1922 when he moved to Teachers College, his primary focus was pedagogy. But these shifting foci were for Coe a part of a larger whole within which he understood the meaning of religious education. Like Dewey, Coe considered philosophy to be a general theory of education.
Professor Coe's first important contribution was a book entitled "The Spiritual Life." This was published in 1900. Like the previous studies of Starbuck and of Leuba it was chiefly concerned with the religious conversion experience. It differed from Starbuck's important study in the fact that it was not wholly dependent upon the answers to questionnaires. Coe had dealt with his subjects personally and had subjected them to various tests with special reference to temperament and suggestibility.
Prof. Coe was a member of the American Psychological Association and of the American Philosophical Association. He was president for 1909-1910 of the Religious Education Association. He was a copious contributor to philosophical, theological, and educational magazines.
The death of George Albert Coe in Claremont, CA, on November 9, 1951, reminds us of the important movement for the study of the psychology of religion in which he had a leading part at the turn of the century. Among the first in the field was James H. Leuba, who in 1896 published a doctor's thesis dealing with the religious conversion experience. This was three years before Edwin Starbuck's Psychology of Religion, but as early as Dr. Starbuek had read a paper before the Indiana College Association which foreshadowed his later work. Stanley Hall was also a leading spirit in the movement and his "Journal of Religions Psychology and Education" became its movement important vehicle. William James brought the movement to a brilliant climax with the publication of his "Varieties of Religious Experience." Two important European representatives were Theodore Flournoy of Geneva, and Henri Delacroit of Paris.
Coe left his private papers to Yale Divinity School. A portion of these papers, primarily letters and seminary minutes bearing upon his resignation in 1922 from Union Theological Seminary, were closed to scholars until 1977 at Coe's request. Coe's correspondence is filed in folders according to year. Since Coe's style, even in private letters, was always impersonal and reticent, these letters give little information beyond what is more readily available in his books and articles. - Who's Who in America
PROF. GEORGE ALBERT10 COE, PhD, LLD (Rev. George W.9, Ezra8, Jesse7, Jesse6, Capt. David5, Capt. Joseph4, Capt. John3, Robert2, Robert1), was born into a Methodist parsonage on March 26, 1862, in Mendon, Monroe County, in western New York. He was the son of the Rev. George W. Coe and Harriet Van Voorhis to whom also a daughter, Hattie, was born.
The Genesse Annual Conference within which Reverend Coe served was called "the burnt-over district" by the nineteenth century revivalist, Charles Finney. Finney was referring to the intensity with which successive generations of Methodist circuit riders preached a fiery rhetoric of judgment and salvation throughout the region. Throughout Coe's boyhood, evangelical fervor and millennial and perfectionist enthusiasms kept the Genesse Annual Conference in turmoil.
Coe wrote only briefly of his family but his scattered references suggest a family lacking in easy intimacy, a family in which the emotive piety of the mother softened somewhat the doctrinal orthodoxy of the father. Coe enjoyed the rural settings of his family's parsonages, developing a life-long love of the out-of-doors.
In 1884, at eighteen, Coe left home to enter the University of Rochester, a church-related college in the style of the mid-nineteenth century. Coe began his college years without "an inward testimony" of his salvation. But since his own father had not experienced a conversion until his twentieth year that was not initially a problem. Despite Coe's fervent prayers, the first years of college passed without his experiencing anything. Coe's description of this time is exceptionally brief, but it does convey how deeply he yearned for certitude. The quest ended when Coe made a conscious decision to ask no longer for the spiritual certainty that eluded him. Resolutely putting to one side the question of whether or not he had been accepted by God, Coe committed his life to "the Christian way." Breaking with the tradition of his church and his family, Coe counted himself a Christian on the basis of his own ethical decision.
His second commitment was inspired by his biology teacher who held up to his students the meticulous care with which Darwin organized his empirical data to support his hypothesis in "The Origin of Species" (1859). One Sunday morning, Coe solemnly espoused the scientific method vowing to follow it wherever it might lead, thus joining the ranks of those who in increasing numbers were finding their security in methods of inquiry, of observation, of experience, or forming and following hypotheses.
After graduation from Rochester and still looking forward to a career in ministry, Coe began a three year divinity course at Methodist-related Boston University. At Boston, he made a third commitment that would be decisive for his future: he turned away from theology and toward philosophy and he shifted his career goal from minister to professor. His philosophy professor was Borden Parker Bowne who, until his death in 1910, was the foremost philosopher within American Methodism. From Bowne, Coe learned to think of natural processes and religion itself as under law and yet at the same time to think of them under categories of freedom and personality. Bowne taught that personality was the only reality in the universe. He declared that the universe itself finally is "immaterial, conscious and personal."
Bowne's personalism was a life-long legacy which Coe modified but never repudiated. Coe received an STB in 1887. He stayed another year studying philosophy under Bowne and received an MA in 1888. Boston awarded him a PhD in 1891 and the same year honored him with Joseph Sleeper Traveling Fellowship.
What he later called "his word of destiny" came to him in 1886 when he met Sadie E. Knowland of Alameda, CA. They were married on September 3, 1888, and spent the next two years at the University of Southern California (USC), where Coe held what he called "a humble post" teaching philosophy.
They married with mutual understanding of his wife's ambition to have a career in music and Coe wrote that neither of them for a moment regretted it. "To work side by side in our respective profession," he wrote, "seemed to us to be at once destiny and duty and highest happiness." Both had yearned to study abroad and were elated when Coe won the traveling fellowship.
They decided to go to Berlin, Germany, where George Albert studied at the University of Berlin and Sadie found teachers who developed her talents as a pianist and her interests in music theory.
Coe was thirty years old when he completed his formal studies at Berlin in 1892. He was by then a liberal Protestant affirming no creed but fully committed to central principles coming from the eighteenth century Enlightenment.
Although liberal theology was a protean movement, it had a common core. The three root principles that gave liberalism coherence were continuity, autonomy and dynamism. The principle continuity enabled liberals to reject the ancient distinctions between the human and the divine, Christianity and other religions, the sacred and the secular, the individual and society and the natural and the supernatural. The principle of autonomy led liberals to reject any arbitrary appeal to external authority.
Believing that since the Enlightenment human beings had "come of age," the liberals celebrated the autonomous reason, which now became the judge of all things including the truths traditionally verified by revelation. The third principle was dynamism. Influenced by Hegel, the new theology was characterized by a dynamic view of God's revelation in history. Progressive revelation now became the norm in interpreting the Bible and liberals increasingly adopted a perspective in which all theological formulations were seen as tentative.
Coe's own life experiences made him perceptive to these principles. Both his commitment to science and evolutionary theory, and his commitment to Bowne's idealist personalism reinforced his own understanding of continuity as a root principle in both nature and religion. The continuity of religious growth from childhood to adolescence to adulthood would become a hallmark of his teachings.
The centrality of autonomy in Coe's life is well expressed in an autobiographical sketch where he wrote that his rejection of theological orthodoxy was occasioned by theology's fallacious view of authority and was only the beginning of his heterodoxy. In time he would question economic, social and political orthodoxies of all kinds.
The Inauguration of Professor George Albert Coe, PhD, LLD, as Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology took place on Tuesday evening, November 16, 1909, at eight-fifteen o'clock, in the Adams Chapel. The procession, consisting of the Seminary Choir, the Directors and Faculty of the Seminary, and representatives of neighboring seminaries, entered the chapel during the organ voluntary by Dr. Gerrit Smith, the Musical Director of the Seminary. The Lord's Prayer was repeated, followed by the Chant "Venite, Exultemus Domino." The Rev. Professor William Adams Brown, PhD., DD, read the Scripture Lesson, from Ephesians iv., and the choir sang, as an anthem, the "Magnificat" by Garrett.
The President of the Board of Directors, Robert C. Ogden, LLD, made the following statement: "On the 20th of April, 1909, the Board of Directors of the Union Theological Seminary, by unanimous vote, elected Professor George Albert Coe, PhD, LLD, Professor of Philosophy in Northwestern University, to the Skinner and McAlpin Chair of Practical Theology. Professor Coe has accepted, and has already taken up his work here."
Coe's life-long openness to dynamism was both an intellectual commitment and an expression of his own optimistic temperament. He lived through the first half of the twentieth century and nothing in that tumultuous period, neither the totalitarianisms of the right nor the left, nor the destruction wrought by two world wars, changed his ebullient confidence that the conscience of modernity was being sensitized to ever higher values in an ongoing historical process that he believed was profoundly religious.
From 1892 to 1927, Coe taught at three institutions: Northwestern University (1892-1909) in Evanston, IL, and two institutions in New York City, Union Theological Seminary (1909-1922) and Teachers College, Columbia University (1922-1927).
He joined Northwestern's faculty with teaching responsibility in the fields of philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, the same responsibilities John Dewey held at the University of Chicago from 1894-1904. When Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904, he taught principally in the area of philosophy. When Coe left Northwestern his focus shifted to psychology and pedagogy; and, later in 1922 when he moved to Teachers College, his primary focus was pedagogy. But these shifting foci were for Coe a part of a larger whole within which he understood the meaning of religious education. Like Dewey, Coe considered philosophy to be a general theory of education.
Professor Coe's first important contribution was a book entitled "The Spiritual Life." This was published in 1900. Like the previous studies of Starbuck and of Leuba it was chiefly concerned with the religious conversion experience. It differed from Starbuck's important study in the fact that it was not wholly dependent upon the answers to questionnaires. Coe had dealt with his subjects personally and had subjected them to various tests with special reference to temperament and suggestibility.
Prof. Coe was a member of the American Psychological Association and of the American Philosophical Association. He was president for 1909-1910 of the Religious Education Association. He was a copious contributor to philosophical, theological, and educational magazines.
The death of George Albert Coe in Claremont, CA, on November 9, 1951, reminds us of the important movement for the study of the psychology of religion in which he had a leading part at the turn of the century. Among the first in the field was James H. Leuba, who in 1896 published a doctor's thesis dealing with the religious conversion experience. This was three years before Edwin Starbuck's Psychology of Religion, but as early as Dr. Starbuek had read a paper before the Indiana College Association which foreshadowed his later work. Stanley Hall was also a leading spirit in the movement and his "Journal of Religions Psychology and Education" became its movement important vehicle. William James brought the movement to a brilliant climax with the publication of his "Varieties of Religious Experience." Two important European representatives were Theodore Flournoy of Geneva, and Henri Delacroit of Paris.
Coe left his private papers to Yale Divinity School. A portion of these papers, primarily letters and seminary minutes bearing upon his resignation in 1922 from Union Theological Seminary, were closed to scholars until 1977 at Coe's request. Coe's correspondence is filed in folders according to year. Since Coe's style, even in private letters, was always impersonal and reticent, these letters give little information beyond what is more readily available in his books and articles. - Who's Who in America
The Genesse Annual Conference within which Reverend Coe served was called "the burnt-over district" by the nineteenth century revivalist, Charles Finney. Finney was referring to the intensity with which successive generations of Methodist circuit riders preached a fiery rhetoric of judgment and salvation throughout the region. Throughout Coe's boyhood, evangelical fervor and millennial and perfectionist enthusiasms kept the Genesse Annual Conference in turmoil.
Coe wrote only briefly of his family but his scattered references suggest a family lacking in easy intimacy, a family in which the emotive piety of the mother softened somewhat the doctrinal orthodoxy of the father. Coe enjoyed the rural settings of his family's parsonages, developing a life-long love of the out-of-doors.
In 1884, at eighteen, Coe left home to enter the University of Rochester, a church-related college in the style of the mid-nineteenth century. Coe began his college years without "an inward testimony" of his salvation. But since his own father had not experienced a conversion until his twentieth year that was not initially a problem. Despite Coe's fervent prayers, the first years of college passed without his experiencing anything. Coe's description of this time is exceptionally brief, but it does convey how deeply he yearned for certitude. The quest ended when Coe made a conscious decision to ask no longer for the spiritual certainty that eluded him. Resolutely putting to one side the question of whether or not he had been accepted by God, Coe committed his life to "the Christian way." Breaking with the tradition of his church and his family, Coe counted himself a Christian on the basis of his own ethical decision.
His second commitment was inspired by his biology teacher who held up to his students the meticulous care with which Darwin organized his empirical data to support his hypothesis in "The Origin of Species" (1859). One Sunday morning, Coe solemnly espoused the scientific method vowing to follow it wherever it might lead, thus joining the ranks of those who in increasing numbers were finding their security in methods of inquiry, of observation, of experience, or forming and following hypotheses.
After graduation from Rochester and still looking forward to a career in ministry, Coe began a three year divinity course at Methodist-related Boston University. At Boston, he made a third commitment that would be decisive for his future: he turned away from theology and toward philosophy and he shifted his career goal from minister to professor. His philosophy professor was Borden Parker Bowne who, until his death in 1910, was the foremost philosopher within American Methodism. From Bowne, Coe learned to think of natural processes and religion itself as under law and yet at the same time to think of them under categories of freedom and personality. Bowne taught that personality was the only reality in the universe. He declared that the universe itself finally is "immaterial, conscious and personal."
Bowne's personalism was a life-long legacy which Coe modified but never repudiated. Coe received an STB in 1887. He stayed another year studying philosophy under Bowne and received an MA in 1888. Boston awarded him a PhD in 1891 and the same year honored him with Joseph Sleeper Traveling Fellowship.
What he later called "his word of destiny" came to him in 1886 when he met Sadie E. Knowland of Alameda, CA. They were married on September 3, 1888, and spent the next two years at the University of Southern California (USC), where Coe held what he called "a humble post" teaching philosophy.
They married with mutual understanding of his wife's ambition to have a career in music and Coe wrote that neither of them for a moment regretted it. "To work side by side in our respective profession," he wrote, "seemed to us to be at once destiny and duty and highest happiness." Both had yearned to study abroad and were elated when Coe won the traveling fellowship.
They decided to go to Berlin, Germany, where George Albert studied at the University of Berlin and Sadie found teachers who developed her talents as a pianist and her interests in music theory.
Coe was thirty years old when he completed his formal studies at Berlin in 1892. He was by then a liberal Protestant affirming no creed but fully committed to central principles coming from the eighteenth century Enlightenment.
Although liberal theology was a protean movement, it had a common core. The three root principles that gave liberalism coherence were continuity, autonomy and dynamism. The principle continuity enabled liberals to reject the ancient distinctions between the human and the divine, Christianity and other religions, the sacred and the secular, the individual and society and the natural and the supernatural. The principle of autonomy led liberals to reject any arbitrary appeal to external authority.
Believing that since the Enlightenment human beings had "come of age," the liberals celebrated the autonomous reason, which now became the judge of all things including the truths traditionally verified by revelation. The third principle was dynamism. Influenced by Hegel, the new theology was characterized by a dynamic view of God's revelation in history. Progressive revelation now became the norm in interpreting the Bible and liberals increasingly adopted a perspective in which all theological formulations were seen as tentative.
Coe's own life experiences made him perceptive to these principles. Both his commitment to science and evolutionary theory, and his commitment to Bowne's idealist personalism reinforced his own understanding of continuity as a root principle in both nature and religion. The continuity of religious growth from childhood to adolescence to adulthood would become a hallmark of his teachings.
The centrality of autonomy in Coe's life is well expressed in an autobiographical sketch where he wrote that his rejection of theological orthodoxy was occasioned by theology's fallacious view of authority and was only the beginning of his heterodoxy. In time he would question economic, social and political orthodoxies of all kinds.
The Inauguration of Professor George Albert Coe, PhD, LLD, as Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology took place on Tuesday evening, November 16, 1909, at eight-fifteen o'clock, in the Adams Chapel. The procession, consisting of the Seminary Choir, the Directors and Faculty of the Seminary, and representatives of neighboring seminaries, entered the chapel during the organ voluntary by Dr. Gerrit Smith, the Musical Director of the Seminary. The Lord's Prayer was repeated, followed by the Chant "Venite, Exultemus Domino." The Rev. Professor William Adams Brown, PhD., DD, read the Scripture Lesson, from Ephesians iv., and the choir sang, as an anthem, the "Magnificat" by Garrett.
The President of the Board of Directors, Robert C. Ogden, LLD, made the following statement: "On the 20th of April, 1909, the Board of Directors of the Union Theological Seminary, by unanimous vote, elected Professor George Albert Coe, PhD, LLD, Professor of Philosophy in Northwestern University, to the Skinner and McAlpin Chair of Practical Theology. Professor Coe has accepted, and has already taken up his work here."
Coe's life-long openness to dynamism was both an intellectual commitment and an expression of his own optimistic temperament. He lived through the first half of the twentieth century and nothing in that tumultuous period, neither the totalitarianisms of the right nor the left, nor the destruction wrought by two world wars, changed his ebullient confidence that the conscience of modernity was being sensitized to ever higher values in an ongoing historical process that he believed was profoundly religious.
From 1892 to 1927, Coe taught at three institutions: Northwestern University (1892-1909) in Evanston, IL, and two institutions in New York City, Union Theological Seminary (1909-1922) and Teachers College, Columbia University (1922-1927).
He joined Northwestern's faculty with teaching responsibility in the fields of philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, the same responsibilities John Dewey held at the University of Chicago from 1894-1904. When Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904, he taught principally in the area of philosophy. When Coe left Northwestern his focus shifted to psychology and pedagogy; and, later in 1922 when he moved to Teachers College, his primary focus was pedagogy. But these shifting foci were for Coe a part of a larger whole within which he understood the meaning of religious education. Like Dewey, Coe considered philosophy to be a general theory of education.
Professor Coe's first important contribution was a book entitled "The Spiritual Life." This was published in 1900. Like the previous studies of Starbuck and of Leuba it was chiefly concerned with the religious conversion experience. It differed from Starbuck's important study in the fact that it was not wholly dependent upon the answers to questionnaires. Coe had dealt with his subjects personally and had subjected them to various tests with special reference to temperament and suggestibility.
Prof. Coe was a member of the American Psychological Association and of the American Philosophical Association. He was president for 1909-1910 of the Religious Education Association. He was a copious contributor to philosophical, theological, and educational magazines.
The death of George Albert Coe in Claremont, CA, on November 9, 1951, reminds us of the important movement for the study of the psychology of religion in which he had a leading part at the turn of the century. Among the first in the field was James H. Leuba, who in 1896 published a doctor's thesis dealing with the religious conversion experience. This was three years before Edwin Starbuck's Psychology of Religion, but as early as Dr. Starbuek had read a paper before the Indiana College Association which foreshadowed his later work. Stanley Hall was also a leading spirit in the movement and his "Journal of Religions Psychology and Education" became its movement important vehicle. William James brought the movement to a brilliant climax with the publication of his "Varieties of Religious Experience." Two important European representatives were Theodore Flournoy of Geneva, and Henri Delacroit of Paris.
Coe left his private papers to Yale Divinity School. A portion of these papers, primarily letters and seminary minutes bearing upon his resignation in 1922 from Union Theological Seminary, were closed to scholars until 1977 at Coe's request. Coe's correspondence is filed in folders according to year. Since Coe's style, even in private letters, was always impersonal and reticent, these letters give little information beyond what is more readily available in his books and articles. - Who's Who in America
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