George Whitefield at 300 Conference

Today has been released the Call for Papers for a conference that I'm organising on the eighteenth-century evangelical revivalist George Whitefield. 2014 will mark the tercentenary of his birth, an ideal opportunity for reassessment of his life and legacy.

Organised in partnership with the Manchester Wesley Research Centre, the Oxford Centre for Methodist Studies and the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, the conference will be held at Pembroke College, Oxford, on 25-27 June 2014.

Keynote speakers at the gathering will include Mark Noll (Notre Dame, US), Carla Gardina Pestana (UCLA), Bill Gibson (Oxford Brookes), Boyd Schlenther and myself (Aberystwyth).

Anybody interested in attending, or in offering a paper can find full details here: Whitefield Call for Papers.

Engaging with Lloyd-Jones reviews

Since last bloging there has been quite a lot of activity on the Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones front. After a bit of a wait those who see it as their calling to defend Lloyd-Jones have weighed in with their reviews of the book.

Iain Murray published a predictably crticial review in the June 2012 edition of the Banner of Truth magazine. Murray unfortunately feels unable to recommend the book to Banner readers; his criticisms consist of his customary scepticism of the orthodoxy of those evangelicals who write history from an academic standpoint, and his sense that none of us can possible understand Lloyd-Jones anyway because he was so far ahead of us mere mortals in terms of spiritual maturity. Apparently we have to wait for a religious revival in order to adequate appreciate him!

Then in inordinate detail Graham Harrison has published a two part review that seems to have begun life as a paper to the Westminster Fellowship. Its available here: part 1 and part 2. With his usual pugnaciousness, Harrison offers his fairly predictable criticisms on a chapter by chapter basis. I found his personal references to my background and current ecclesiastical position entirely unnecessary (and also factually incorrect)! But here, as with Murray's review, there was the usual beatification of Lloyd-Jones!

With rapier like accuracy Carl Trueman has offered a review of Murray's review (many of his comments can be equally applied to the Harrison pieces as well), under the brilliant title: The sin of Uzzah. On one level its an outstanding explanation and justification of how evangelicals can and should write history. But it also hits the nail squarely on the head in terms of the tendency of some towards an unhealthy obsession with defending all, or nearly all, of Lloyd-Jones' views and actions.


A couple of more balanced reviews have appeared by:

J. Whitgift

and Peter Webster.

I'll add more links as and when futher reviews appear.

Another Engaging with Martyn Lloyd Jones review

One more review of my Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones (2011) has appeared in the last few days. Its entitled 'The Legacy of Martyn Lloyd-Jones', and by Revd William Davies in the Methodist Recorder (12 April 2012), 17.

It summarises the book, suggests that it doesn't entirely escape the perils of hagiography (although never actually specifies where it does get a little too close to its subject), but mostly just describes its contents. Again there's not a lot of incisive engagement with the content and interpretations offered in the book!

Just published: The Elect Methodists

Hot off the press today, my latest book, a history of Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales in the long eighteenth century.

The Elect Methodists is the first full-length academic study of Calvinistic Methodism, a movement that emerged in the eighteenth century as an alternative to the better-known Wesleyan grouping. While the branch of Methodist led by John Wesley has received significant historical attention, Calvinistic Methodism, especially in England, has not. This book charts the sources of the eighteenth-century Methodist revival in the context of Protestant evangelicalism emerging in continental Europe and colonial North America, before proceeding to follow the fortunes in both England and Wales of the Calvinistic branch, to the establishing of formal denominations in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.


Mark Noll writes of the volume:
'This much-needed volume opens up the history of the eighteenth-century Calvinistic Methodism as a single narrative embracing both England and Wales. It offers superb treatment of the larger-than-life individuals who made this Calvinistic movement nearly the equal of its Wesleyan counterpart - including Griffith Jones, Daniel Rowland and Howel Harris (Wales), the Countess of Huntingdon and Thomas Haweis (England), and George Whitefield (everywhere). The book also succeeds in explaining why Calvinistic methodism faded in England while becoming a permanent part of the Welsh religious landscape. This is an important history very well told'.

Engaging with Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones . . .

A few more reviews of Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones: the Life and Legacy of 'the Doctor' (2011) have appeared in the past week or two. For more details click on the links below:

 Andy Morgan reviews it on his blog at: lukefourteenthritythree

There's the briefest of reviews in the: Church of England Newspaper

Collin Hansen writes a joint review with Alister Chapman's new biography of John Stott under the title: 'Notalgia is the enemy of Faith: Learn from your hero's warts' at: The Gospel Coalition

There's a review by Andrew Davies in The Evangelical Magazine, vol. 51, no. 2 (March & April, 2012), 25.

And finally Colin Maxwell writes in the British Church Newspaper (10 February 2012), 14.

All the reviews remain remarkably positive so far. If there's a slight disappoinment in some of the responses to date then its the tendency of most reviewers to self-indulgence, providing a personal paean of praise to Lloyd-Jones, rather than actually critically engaging with the content of some of the essays in the collection.

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.