Appreciating F. F. Bruce.

Tim Grass' F. F. Bruce: A Life (Milton Keynes: Authentic Media, 2011) is billed as the definitive biography of the famous New Testament scholar. Its certainly a fascinating read, and Grass has done a terrific job in tracing the main contours of his life and career, sprinkling the narrative with fascinating glimpses into the real Bruce, and also laying bare his intellectual development, mainly through the eyes of his chief publications.

Fred Bruce's life spanned the greater part of the twentieth century. Born in the north-east of Scotland in 1910; Bruce's early life was moulded by his Brethren upbringing. He studied Classics at Aberdeen, and only later moved somewhat effortlessly into Biblical Studies, famously becoming the Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at Manchester in 1959.

I don't want to comment on the whole of the book here, some of my reviews have been getting far too long lately. So I'll just comment on a few of the areas of the book which I found particularly interesting and helpful.

As an evangelical and a profesional historian working in the 'secular' univeristy system, I guess I owe a certain indirect debt to Bruce, since he was perhaps one of the first to demonstrate to the wider evangelical constituency, which in the first half of the twentieth century was notably anti-intellectual, that it was possible to be faithful to scripture and be academically rigorous, and respected. Bruce broke ground that many others, in both biblical studies and other cognate areas, have to continued to plough with considerable profit.

Woven as a thread throughout the book, is Grass' detailed treatment of Bruce views on the nature of Scripture. In some more fundamentalist circles, Bruce has been regarded as 'unsound', and suspect in this area. While he certainly did not go out of his way to affirm the notion of inerrancy, Grass argues that Bruce stuck closer to Calvin's view of biblical inspiration - allowing greater space for the witness and testimony of the Holy Spirit - than to the Princtonian and Warfieldian view that had come to dominate certain aspects of British evangelicalism by the 1950s.

There's much more here too; Grass unsurprisingly, having already written a detailed history of the Brethren, provides much on Bruce's Brethren background. Although belonging to the Open, rather than the Exclusive, Brethren, Bruce was in many ways an untypical Christian brother. A strong critic of the kind of dispensationalism current in Brethren circles, and no fan of their premillenialism either, Grass suggests that Bruce was often tolerated on account of his eminence as a biblical scholar rather than for his passionate advocacy of Brethren distinctives. His embrace of women's ministry tested that tolerance to the limits it seems!

Grass is not afraid to make some more critical comments either. Bruce was much stronger in print than in person it seems. While respected as a teacher his lecturing and preaching style were hardly inspiring!

This is a fine biography, striking an ideal balance between a standard type life and a more intellectual biography. Maybe it should have been titled 'The Life and Thought of F. F. Bruce'?!

Calvin quincentenary - revisited

I've been reading the published version of the keynote addresses from the Calvin quincentenary conference I attended in Geneva during May 2009. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the conference for a couple of days, and didn't actually hear many of the most interesting of the keynote papers - so its good to catch up with them here.

Irena Backus and Philip Benedict (eds), Calvin & his Influence, 1509-2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) consists of fifteen essays, some on Calvin himself, and his influence during his lifetime, others on the longer term impact of his thought through Europe and beyond. In many ways its a volume that summarises the history of Calvin studies, and gives a sense of where the discipline is at today. As with any collection of essays they're a little mixed in quality, and I felt that some of those translated from French and German didn't work all that well in English. I dont intend to comment on all of them here, just a few of what I felt were the highlights.

Diarmaid McCulloch's chapter on Calvin as a Fifth Latin Doctor of the Church, setting him in the context of Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Gregory, is almost worth the price of the volume in itself. McCulloch argues that Calvin's Institutes, his commentaries and his sermons were a careful distillation of the post Chalcedon, Augustine dominated Western Christian tradition - Calvin was entirely maintstream!

One of the themes that emerges repeatedly from some of the chapters dealing with Calvin's legacy is the extent to which Calvin remained a shadowy figure, and many 'Calvinists' strove to define themselves without explicit reference to the Genevan reformer. This is certainly something I've noticed in some of my recent work on the Welsh Reformed tradition - many eighteenth century Welsh Calvinists were proud to call themselves Calvinist but had limited exposure to Calvin himself and were often at pains that they discovered Reformed theology through the plain reading of Scripture than through their reading of Calvin.

This is certainly a line of argument that Richard A. Muller has explored to the full in recent years, and his chapter: 'Reference and Response: Referencing and Understanding Calvin in seventeeth-century Calvinism', provides more evidence for the reluctance of many in the seventeenth century to elevate Calvin to 'high authority' (p. 182).

The eighteenth century has generally been held to be a low point in the fortunes of Calvinism, at least in Europe. In an excellent chapter Ernestine van der Wall, looks at the fortunes of Calvin in Holland during the era of the Enlightenment. The chapter argues that for much of the eighteenth century Calvin remained a 'distant' figure (p. 202). Those Enlightenment figures who bothered to engage with him tended to dismiss him as intolerant and despotic on account of the Servetus affair. Yet in the eighteenth century attitudes towards Calvin 'varied between the more orthodox Reformed Protestants and their liberal and progressive brethren' (p. 211). Responses could be classified into three broad types: the orthodox, who were interested in worrying deviations from Reformed orthodoxy; the moderately enlightened Protestants and the much more radically progressive Protestants.The three types are illustrated with Dutch-orientated case studies.

Also highly enlightening is David Bebbington's essay on responses to Calvin among British evangelicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A tremendously rich and detailed essay traces the varying fortunes of Calvinism, and concludes by arguing that there remained considerable distance between British evangelicals and Calvin during both centuries. Particularly useful, given my Lloyd-Jones interests, is Bebbington's judgement that the Reformed 'revival', if thats not too strong a term, led by Jim Packer and Lloyd-Jones from the mid 1950s onwards, while it certainly had 'wide appeal' (p. 297) was largely theological, having few if any socio-political implications.

So like all essay collections there something here for most readers. In many ways this is a great intorduction to scholarly study on Calvin, and the state of the scholarly debates on many aspects of his life, career and influence.

John Stott - a one man magisterium?

Alister Chapman's, Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) is the full length biography of Stott to appear since the publication of Timothy Dudley-Smith's mamoth two-volume official life (1999 & 2001). Where that was a largely uncritical chronicle of Stott's life and ministry, Chapman's study is a richly contextualised attempt to understand Stott in his context. It is, therefore, the first really critical analysis of Stott, dubbed the Pope of the evangelical movement, yet to appear. Published shortly after his death it comes at an opportune moment for analysis and assessment of his life and legacy within worldwide evagelicalism.

Despite my initial disappointment that the book was just a slender 160 pages, I have to say at the outset, that I thought this was an outstanding study - a model of careful and considered scolarship and interpretation, sympathetic to its subject, yet incisive in its evaluations also. In the end I felt that its succinctness, far from detracting from the book, was actually what made it such a convincing, even compelling piece of writing.

While very much a straighforward biography, Chapman approaches Stott's life throught six broad themes; conversion, students, parishioners, Anglicans, society and the world, each reflective of some of the main areas and transitions in Stott's life. I'll comment on just a few of them in what follows.

Stott's background and early Christian development is vital to understanding some of the forces that shaped him; indeed the scope and character of Stott's early ministry was conditioned by it. His upper middle class upbringing (the son of a Harley Street doctor), public school education (at Rugby) and undergraduate years at Cambridge, ensured that Stott never really shook off that elitist air! His early Christian influences came through E. J. Nash, and so were deeply imbued with American fundamentalism, something he gradually moved away from as a result of his activities with the Cambridge Inter Collegiate Christian Union, especially after it came in for criticism from Michael Ramsay in the mid 1950s. Like Nash though, Stott was inspired by his very out-dated example of reaching the top two percent of society for Christ, and it was with this vision very much in mind that he entered the Anglican ministry, at time when things seemed to be looking up for the church in Britain at the end of the Second World War.

One of the most revealing chapters in Chapman's book is his study of Stott's All Souls minsitry. Chapman argues that Stott struggled to adapt to the changing circumstance of the 1960s. While his ministry to the well heeled middle classes who lived in one half of the All Souls parish was predictably successfull, his inabilty to adapt to meet the needs of the poorer inhabitants of the other half of his parish led to Stott to question his suitability to parish ministry, at least in the kind of world that confronted him in the 1960s. Stott's high hopes at the beginning of his All Souls ministry that his efforts would lead to revival ultimately proved to be his undoing. Stott, Chapman argues, simply grew 'tired of parish ministry after twenty-four years' and ran out of ideas (p. 76).

It is surely no coincidence therefore that as Stott's interest in his parish waned so his interest in the affairs of the wider Anglican church increased. Here Chapman argues that Stott was determiend that evangelicals play a full part in the life of their church, something they had reneged on for various reasons for decades previously. In a short discussion of the clash with Martyn Lloyd-Jones in 1966, Chapman argues that ultimately their clash was over different responses to the same problem, the decline of Britain's Protestant identity by the 1960s. For Lloyd-Jones the answer was a new ecumenism among evangelicals only, for Stott the goal remained national influence (p. 94). But again the theme of Stott's gradual disillusionment with the gains possible from his involvement in the affairs of the Anglican communion became apparent. Where the Keele evangelical congress had generated enthusiasm in 1967, its follow-up at Nottingham in 1977 laid bare many of the fractures in Anglican evangelicalism. Stott's inability to hold Anglican evangelicalism together, Chapman argues, as well as his failure to reach the bench of bishops, meant that he quickly 'tired' of Anglican politics altogether (p. 111).

At the same time more and more of Stott's energies were spent on his worldwide ministry, and from the 1970s onward this gradually gathered pace. It was also the time when Stott made a still more dramatic shift perhaps, in his passionate advocacy of social action, as being of the essence of the evangelicals calling in the world. Channelled through the 1974 Lausane Covenant, Stott certainly moved decisvely to the Left, both in religious and also political terms during the 1970s. In Chapman's words: 'he read the left-leaning Guardian while they (most evangelical Anglicans) read the reliably conservative Daily Telegraph' (p. 122). But again Stott's new advocacy of the social reponsibilities of evangelicals had a mixed response. For some it sounded too much like the social gospel of old, while for American evangelicals the thought that their attitudes might actually be impeeding the hearing of the gospel beyond the West was more than they could stomach. Again Chapman is sanguine about the extent of Stott's success here. While Issues facing Christians Today (1984) found its way onto the bookshelves of most evangelicals, his legacy in this area was probably more indirect, he laid out a vision for social advocacy which others were able to take up and act upon to varying degrees.

Then finally Chapman deals with Stott's world wide ministry in the final decades of his life. Largely through Lausanne and then later Stott's own Langham Partnership he came to enjoy an enormous influence on world wide evangelicalism. He became, in effect, the leading thinker, theologian (in a sense) and intellectual of global evangelicalism. But again Chapman is realistic; if Stott encountered problems uniting evangelicals within the Anglican communion in the 1960s and 70s, uniting the global evangelical movement simply 'proved too difficult' (p. 146).

The Stott that, therefore, emerges from these pages is certainly a very attractive one, but one with flaws and obvious limitations as well. But maybe it was in his ability to recognise those flaws and limitiations, and then also face up to their implications, that his claim to true greatness lies?

There's a sense in which I've only really scratched the surface of Chapman's study here: its a terrific study of the development of evangelicalism during the second half of the twentieth century in Britain and beyond, as well as a book that reveals much about Stott's character. As such it repays very careful reading indeed . . .

A couple more Engaging with Lloyd-Jones reviews

A couple more reviews of Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones: the Life and Legacy of 'the Doctor' (2011) have appeared in the past couple of weeks.

David Atkinson, Assistant bishop (Southwark) reviews it in Church Times.

Carl Trueman's review appeared over at the Reformation 21 site.

For those readers of Welsh, see D. Ben Rees in Y Goleuad (10 February 2012), p. 4.

All positive so far . . .

'Seeing things their way'

One of the most interesting themes that has emerged from some of the recent online reviews of my Engaging with Lloyd-Jones has been the tension that exists between the way in which academic professional evangelical historians and more amateur evangelical writers of history go about the task of writing about the past, and especially about the Christian past. The professionals being suspicious of the ulterior motives of amateur histories, while the amateurs tend to be highly sceptical of the supposed academic reluctance to bring divine agency into their discussions

Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory (eds), Seeing Things their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), is a collection of historiographical essays, that while not addressing this precise issue, nonetheless provides a lot of help for those who write about the Christian past - and indeed persuasively suggests an approach of so doing.

What unites each of these eleven essays is their engagement with the approach to intellectual history developed by Quentin Skinner and his 'Cambridge School'. Put simply, and largely in reference to political thought and using largely political texts, Skinner's basic position is that: 'we should identify the precise intellectual and political contexts of the texts we are studying, in order to ascertain what their authors meant and what they were doing' (p. 2). One of the most obvious blind spots in Skinner's approach has been his lack of interest in religion and religious belief - despite being an early modernist. The authors of this collection suggest that adopting Skinner's approach to the study of religious communities in the past, in Skinner's words, 'appreciating their views and, so far as possible, seeing things their way' (p. 2), would enable us to histories of religion that take our subjects more seriously on their own terms.

On the surface it sounds a relatively simple concept, but in reality the past, and especially the religious past, has tended to be interpreted in the light of present beliefs and concerns, both among unbelievers and believers, indeed especially among the latter perhaps.

The chapters in the book explore the relevance of Skinner's approach across a range of historical periods and subjects. I won't comment on each chapter here, just a few that I found of immediate relevance to my own research interests.

I found Richard A. Muller's chapter: 'Reflections on Persistent Whiggism and its Antidotes in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Intellectual History', really useful for my writing of a chapter on Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and the Reformed tradition. Muller suggests an alternative approach to the study of Calvin and Calvinism, criticising the Whig preocuppation with Calvin himself, and the extent to which those who came after him either agreed or diffiered from him. Muller suggests rather the evolution of a Reformed tradition following the death of Calvin that didn't necessarily measure itself against agreement with Calvin himself. 'Very few of the writers of the sixteenth and sevententh centuries now commonly identified as "Calvinist" would have described themselves strictly as followers of Calvin' (p. 147). The key then is too evaluate key thinkers within the context of their own time, not from the perspective of those who came after.

Also helpful was James E. Bradley chapters on the eighteenth century: 'The Changing Shape of Religious Ideas in Enlightened England'. Building on J. G. A. Pocock's conviction that the 'Enlightenment in England muct be distinguished from its less religious continental counterparts' (p. 175), Bradley explores the close relationship between religion and the age of reason. Indeed, in reference to evangelicalism, Bradley argues that they 'owned and disseminated the traits of optimism, moderation in doctrine, pragmatism, and devotion to experiment and investigation' (p. 180). Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment were inextricably linked - indeed they fed off one another in higly creative ways.

While there is a fair degree of repetition in the book, most chapters understandably begin with a similar discussion of Skinner's 'seeing things their way' quote, the way in which the essays in the volume show the usefulness of Skinner's approach across a wide historical timeframe is very useful indeed.

Mark Noll, in a chapter, explaining how he used this approach when writing his America's God (2003), a social history of theology in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, briefly addresses the tension between professional and academic evangelical historians, and suggests that the methodological approach developed by Skinner might 'steer between the Scylla of unabashed dogmatic triumphalism (or dogmatic denunciation) and the Charybdis of unabashed materialist reduction' (p. 219).

The concluding chapter in which David Bebbington responds to each of the chapters is a helpful summary of the position outlined in the book, and ends with the provocative statement that historians might now like to move well beyond Skinner's position by contending that 'the history of ideas is supremely about religion' (p. 255).

Wales and the British Empire

No matter how much you write, seeing a new essay or book in the print for the first time is always great. Today this volume arrived!

Based on papers given at a symposium at Aberystwyth in September 2007, its a volume containing seven essays examining the many and varied relationships that existed between wales and the expanding British overseas empire between 1650 and 1830.
Part of Manchester University Press' prestigious series 'Studies in Imperialism', its the first ever volume published on this subject. My essay in the collection is entitled:

'Welsh evangelicals, the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world and the creation of a "Christian Republick"'.

Reviews of Engaging with Lloyd-Jones . . . . an extra review or two!

Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Nottingham: Apollos, 2011) has been out for a couple of months, and already there's been quite a bit of interest, mostly in the form of blog reviews. Click on the links below to read more:


Jeremy Walker at The Wanderer.

Guy Davies at Exiled Preacher.

Andrew Rycroft at Double Usefulness.

Adrian Reynolds at The Proclamation Trust.

Gary Brady at Heavenly Worldliness

Gary Benfold briefly at Who's that Preacher?


Most of the views so far have come from the reformed world; most begin with a declaration that the authors are not 'Lloyd-Jones men', most proceed to do a pretty good job of springing to his defence!

I'll put links to more reviews as and when they appear in due course . . .