Faith & Spirit Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

A historian doesn’t toss off “a degree of free will” as a pious mic drop; the phrase is a careful piece of intellectual staging. Latourette is doing two things at once. He grants human agency, but he cabins it. Not “free will” in the sweeping, modern self-help sense, and not the Calvinist grimness of a will bound entirely by providence. A degree: measured, partial, historically workable.

That moderation is the tell. Latourette wrote as a major church historian in the first half of the 20th century, when theological debates weren’t just seminary sport; they were tangled up with democracy’s self-image, the trauma of world wars, and the question of whether “progress” was moral destiny or human construction. By placing freedom on a slider rather than as an absolute, he keeps the door open for responsibility without dethroning divine sovereignty. People can act, err, reform, and build institutions; history remains a moral arena, not a puppet show.

The subtext is also disciplinary. Historians get nervous around total explanations: pure determinism flattens contingency, while pure autonomy turns history into a parade of great men and random choices. “A degree” functions like a methodological compromise disguised as theology, letting Latourette narrate Christianity’s spread as neither inevitable nor accidental. It’s a small clause with big rhetorical utility: it makes room for human blame and human credit, without letting either become the whole story.