'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 . . .

Just published - Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Exciting news today! A box full of my latest book, Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Life and Legacy of 'the Doctor' (Nottingham: Apollos, 2011) arrived. It looks great, I'm really pleased with it. It'll be available in bookshops next week.

Here's a list of the contents to whet appetites:

Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones, 'Introduction: Lloyd-Jones and his biographers'.
1. David Bebbington, 'Lloyd-Jones and the inter-war Calvinist resurgence'.
2. David Ceri Jones, 'Lloyd-Jones and Wales'.
3. Ian Randall, 'Lloyd Jones and revival'.
4. Andrew Atherstone, David Ceri Jones and William K. Kay, 'Lloyd-Jones and the charismatic controversy'.
5. Ben Baillie, 'Lloyd-Jones and the demise of preaching'.
6. Philip H. Eveson, 'Lloyd-Jones and ministerial education'.
7. Robert Pope, 'Lloyd-Jones and fundamentalism'.
8. Robert Strivens, 'Lloyd-Jones and Karl Barth'.
9. John Maiden, 'Lloyd-Jones and Roman Catholicism'.
10. Andrew Atherstone, 'Lloyd-Jones and the Anglican secession crisis'.
11. John Coffey, 'Lloyd-Jones and the Protestant past'
Bibliography: Lloyd-Jones and his writings.

Is there still a scandal afflicting the evangelical mind?

In 1994 Mark Noll published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. His book, which opened with the much quoted line: 'The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind' (p. 3), despite being the concerned reflections of a 'wounded lover' (p. ix), came as something of a shock to evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic. In a largely historical account of evangelical thinking, Noll castigated American evangelicals in the main for their tendency towards anti-intellectualism and the disparagement of academic learning, theological and otherwise.

Now almost twenty years later Noll has published a follow-up volume: Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). In what is in some ways a deceptively simple book, Noll lays out the theological framework for the life of the mind. Where The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was critical and polemic, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind is wholeheartedly positive. Noll argues that the great orthodox Christian creeds should form the basis for Christian intellectual activity; much of his case is built upon their close exposition. At the heart of all Christian thinking and intellectual activity, he argues, should be the person and work of Christ himself.

'Thus the greatest hope for Christian learning in our age, or in any age, lies not in primarily in heightened activity, in better funding, or in strategizing for the task at hand - though all these matters play an important part. Rather, the great hope for Christian learning is to delve deeper into the Christian faith itself. And going deeper in Christian faith means, in the end, learning more about Jesus Christ'.

Or again, and still more sucinctly:

'In sum, to believe that we are attached to Christ inspires the confidence that God can be attached to anything we might study' (p. 33).

At the most foundational level, therefore, for Noll the life of the Christian mind is rooted in an orthodox Christology - the God made flesh who dwelt among us, full of grace of truth. The implications of this theological approach to the life of the mind is worked out in a number of areas by Noll: science, biblical study and, of course, history.

Building upon this Christological foundation, Noll addresses some of the problems that inevitably result from introducing a providential explanation in the writing of history. He argues that there are actually four different types of providential history. There are those histories conditioned by interpretations drawn from special revelation, that is explicitly theological explanations. And then there are histories informed by interpretative questions drawn from the realm of general revelation, not as explicitly or overtly Scriptural in their origin. These approaches, he argues, have resulted in four different kinds of Christian history writing:

i) Histories of Christianity which are orientated towards interpretative questions informed solely by special revealtion (the work of Iain Murray would be a good modern example of this approach).

ii) General histories, on subjects wider than the history of Christianity, which are informed by interpretative questions defined by special revelation (Andrew Walls and Kenneth Scott Latourette would be among the best practitioners of this kind of history writing).

iii) General history informed by interpretative questions informed by general revelation (these can often be quite hard to identify with absolute certainly, but Daniel Walker Howe's, What God hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007), might be a good example).

iv) Finally, there are histories of Christianity that draw upon interpretative questions defined by general revelation (of which there has been a marked resurgence in recent decades led by Noll himself in the US, and others like David Bebbington in the UK).

Some see these approaches as mutually incompatible; in an acrimonious exchange between Iain Murray of the Banner of Truth and Harry Stout, the author of a fairly controversial biography of George Whitefield (The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Birth of Evangelicalism (1992)) a few years ago these differences were played out. Stout largely using the interpretative strictures of general revelation, argued that Whitefield used his skills as an actor to good effect in his open air preaching. For Murray this was entirely out of order, and a betrayal of onces theological beliefs, if not one's entirely Christian profession, since it explained Whitefield's success without recourse to the work of the Holy Spirit.

Yet, surely the writing of history is never a simple straighforward exercise? Divine explanations and human ones dont need to be mutually exclusive: both are essential to the writing of faithful Christian history on the one hand, and good history as judged by the standards of the professional academy on the other. Its precisely here that the Christology comes in: Christ was both divine and human, his taking human flesh gave honour to the physical creation. Special and general revelation while different are therefore both relevant and important, and should be woven together to create the most integrated kinds of history. Or in Noll's words:

'The incarnation joins particularity and universality: the Christian concept of providence encompasses all of creation as well as the narrative of redemption' (p. 98).

Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones soon to be published

Charles Hodge and the Princeton Theology

Ten years in the writing, Paul C. Gutjahr's, Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) is the first biography of Charles Hodge for over a century. That biography, published by his son A. A. Hodge a couple of years after Hodge's death in 1878, was as hagiographical as you would expect. With the exception of a volume of essays on Hodge a few years ago: John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead's (eds), Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), there has been little sustained academic interest in Hodge's life and legacy either, despite a fair bit of writing on the legacy of the Princeton theology within American evangelicalism.

Gutjahr's biography is an outstanding book, written with a terrific lightness of touch that makes its almost 400 pages fly by in no time at all. Its also very thorough indeed giving just the right amount of background detail to many of the significant events that occurred both within US history and American evangelical Christianity during Hodge's lifetime. Hodge served as Professor of Didactic Theology at Princeton Seminary, and then Principal from 1851 until 1878. The abiding image of him is that of a towering intellect certainly, but one who took immense pride in his oft-repeated claim that there was nothing new or innovative whatsoever in his theology or in that taught at Princeton during his time at the helm. There's lots here worthy of comment, but I'll limit myself to a few points:

Gutjahr argues that Hodge was thoroughly immersed in both the traditional Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Scottish Common Sense Realism. At times he comes close to concluding that his Calvinism was largely understood through the lens of Common Sense philosophy. The Puritan heritage and the Enlightenment bore equally heavily on Hodge.

Hodge was a strict Presbyterian, sometimes known as the 'Pope of Presbyterianism' in the US. But the long hegemony that Presbyterians had enjoyed in certain parts of America was a thing of the past by Hodge's time. The Methodists and the Baptists had long since taken over as the largest Protestant groupings, largely the result of the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, with its Camp Meetings and ecstatic piety. Hodge has sometimes been read as an opponent of revival, but Gutjahr shows decisively that it was the wilder elements in mid nineteenth century revivalism that he opposed, and particuarly the Arminian theology of many of its main protagonists - Charles Finney being only the best known of course!

Equally interesting is Gutjahr's treatment of Hodge's long engagement with the subject of slavery. Again it has been assumed that Hodge was a supporter of slavery; in reality Hodge was an opponent of those abolitionists who argued that the Bible was anti-slavery. Controversially, he argued that the Bible did not comment on the morality of slavery, it merely took it for granted. Hodge was not necessarily pro-slavery, merely critical of those who were determined to use the Bible in their arguments against it. Gradually, Hodge came to adopt more prominent anti-slavery views particuarly during the Civil War, but he consistently refused to use the Bible to support that position.

Hodge's attitude to the inspiration of the Bible figures prominently in the closing section of the book, particuarly in a final chapter which looks at his legacy. Hodge's defence of the reliability of Scripture was the foundation upon which his successors A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield built their defence of biblical innerrancy. Although Hodge did not argue for biblical innerancy as such, Gutjahr argues that he certainly came close to that position, and that it proved to be his biggest long term legacy. In Gutjahr's case, Hodge appears as one of the forerunners of the early twentieth-century Fundamentalists. There's much to commend this view, but Hodge was not a wooden biblical literalist. His disputes with the leading Southern Presbyterian leader Benjamin Morgan Palmer, who certainly was a strict biblical literalist, bear this out. And in his preparedness to adopt a day-age interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis he proved himself much more flexible than many of those who claimed his mantle in later decades.

For me the book was marred slightly by very poor proof reading. There were simply too many typos that slipped by the attention of Oxford University Press's copy editors.

But Gutjahr's biography is an excellent example of how an evangelical (I'm assuming this!) can write a sympathetic biography of a fellow evangelical while still maintaining a critical edge. For me it stands alongside the other outstanding example of such a biography, George Marsden's, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2004). So while the content is excellent, there's much to learn and emulate here about how to go about writing a biography as well.