David Ceri's blog

'Seeing things their way'

2012-01-27T22:21:00.000Z

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

2012-01-12T23:18:00.001Z

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!

2012-01-08T14:58:00.001Z

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

2011-11-04T19:35:00.000Z

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?

2011-10-19T21:57:00.003+01:00

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

2011-10-13T15:07:00.000+01:00

Charles Hodge and the Princeton Theology

2011-10-08T16:33:00.004+01:00

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.

Even more Johnny Cash reading

2011-09-20T20:54:00.003+01:00

The brief memoir of Vivian Cash (nee Liberto), I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny (London: Simon & Schuster, 2007), the first wife of Johnny, makes for pretty remarkable reading and gives a very different take on Cash's life than that to be found in many of the better-known accounts. At the heart of the book are the love letters written by Cash and Vivian during the years Cash was stationed in Germany when he was in the US Air Force. The letters are bookended by Vivian Cash's account, filling in the chronological details of her years married to Cash. The Cash narrative she provides is different at a number of key points from the story that has been told in other accounts - especially the very problematic Walk the Line (2005) film biopic and even some of Cash's own autobiographies.

The book begins with an account of the first meeting between Cash and his first wife following the death of June Carter in 2003. At the meeting Vivian talked about her desire to write about her years with Johnny, with both recognising that the time had come for a full disclosure of the story of their marriage. Set up in this way, reader's appetities are whetted for what revelations might follow! Vivian Cash lays the blame for the breakup of her marriage to Johnny almost entirely on Johnny's drug habit, which increased with Johnny's increasing fame and ever more onerous touring committments. Addiction to uppers and downers ensured that the Johnny she had known and married all but disappeared and an aggresive and distant Johnny who she saw less and less of and who she barely recognised became the norm. Predictibly, the other villain who looms large in her account is June Carter, who Vivian accuses of relentlessly pursuing Johnny until he was her - indeed she recalls one instance of meeting June Carter backstage and being informed by her in no uncertain terms: 'Vivian, he will be mine' (p. 298). Later Vivian was almost airbrushed entirely out of Johnny's life. Carter appears almost predatory in Vivian's narrative, a very far cry from the saintly images of her portrayed in other narratives., indeed it bizarre to see both women claiming that God wanted them to be with Johnny, and both praying to the same God at the same time to that effect!

While there's much of the kind of invenctive here that one would expect from Johnny's ex-wife, there also an authenticity in this narrative that is often absent from Johnny own autobiographies. One suspects that Vivian Cash's version of events is much closer to the reality than many of those spun by Cash and June Carter. And of course, 'I Walk the Line' was written with Vivian Cash in mind, not June Carter!

By contrast Tony Tost's, American Recordings (London: Continuum, 2011), part of Continuum's 33 1/3 series, is a very different book, dealing with the other end of Cash's career, his first album in the American Recordings series, which effectively relaunched his career in 1994. Tost examines each of the songs on the album in turn, investigating the terrain inhabited by each of them, and how each song represented something different from Cash's long career and many different personae. There's lots of good close analysis here, but Tost is very dismissive of any song that taps into Cash's religious beliefs. So while each of the songs on the album plumb the depths of Cash's personality, 'Why Me, Lord', his cover of the Kris Kristofferson song, is dismissed as the album's 'proudest, weakest moment' (p. 82). Tost has little understanding of Cash's evangelical beliefs, which he sees as banal and simplistic, and that ultimately did little to save Cash from his self-destructiveness. 'If there is beauty to be found in the song', Tost rites, 'it is the beauty of a Nero softly playing his fiddle as all of Rome burns' (p. 85). Given the insights of the rest of the book, this is a gross over-simplification. The theme of redemption runs as a red chord through Cash's recorded output, but Tost is prepared to dismiss this as just a little disingenuous. Part of the genuis of Cash's music is the juxtapostion of sin and redemption so closely. Not for nothing, surely, does 'Why me, Lord', follow on closely from Cash stark and desperate 'The Beast in Me'.

For me then Tost's book flags up the unsatisfactory way in Cash's religious convictions tend to be dealt with in much of the writing on him. The real reason for this is, it seems, a poor understanding of Cash's religious context, the evangelicalism of the American South. But there was also always a tension in Cash religious pronouncements, certainly Cash was not a straight-forward religious believer, and the way he expressed those views in the public domain evolved over his lifetime. There's still room for a more nuanced and contextualised treatment of Cash the Christian . . .

Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment - the case of John Erskine

2011-09-16T20:52:00.001+01:00

Much work has been done in recent years on the relationship between eighteenth-century evangelicalism and the Enlightenment. Henry Rack’s, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (1989) portrayed Wesley as both a religious enthusiast and a man of Reason. Now Jonathan Yeager in his Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Though of John Erskine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) has written an intellectual biography of the little known Scottish evangelical John Erskine, arguing that he too championed a form of ‘enlightened evangelicalism’. Based in Edinburgh for most of his life, Erskine was the leading evangelical minister in the Church of Scotland for much of the eighteenth century. ‘As a Calvinist, an evangelical, and an empiricist’, Yeager writes, ‘Erskine was teaching that all three belief systems complemented each other’ (p. 80).

Erskine was a disciple of John Locke, and in his espousal of Locke’s empiricism he became a champion of the Moderate Enlightenment, as opposed to the more radical perspectives of the wider Scottish Enlightenment. Erskine, though, was also a Calvinist immersed in the classics of Puritan divinity. Yet his Calvinism was of a variety that John Wesley struggled to understand. A far cry from the deterministic double predestinarian theology with which Wesley tarred all Calvinists, Erskine’s Reformed theology included a commitment to single predestination, a belief in both a limited and an unlimited extent to the atonement, which in turn led to a determination to preach the gospel indiscriminately (pp. 74 6; 201). It was a Calvinism shared by Whitefield and his Calvinistic Methodists, and finely attuned to the optimistic spirit of the age. The correlation between Erskine’s evangelicalism and his enlightened attitudes are dealt with by Yeager in a chapter analysing five of Erskine’s major theological works. In his writings on covenant theology, ecclesiology, faith and the administration of the Lord’s Supper, Yeager builds a picture of Erskine as a ‘polymath’, who drew on disciplines as diverse as theology, philosophy, biblical studies and history, producing ‘theological treatises [which] were bold, innovative, rational and consistent with Moderate Enlightenment epistemology, but they were also scriptural and loyal to traditional Calvinism’ (p. 111).

Erskine also had a more combative side, and was behind the discrediting of John Wesley in Scotland. Traditionally the strength of Calvinism in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland has been thought to be the main reason for Wesley’s lack of success in Scotland, but Yeager argues that it was Erskine’s opposition to Wesley, in the aftermath of Wesley early successful evangelistic incursions into Scotland, that was the real reason. Erskine entered into public dispute with Wesley in his lengthy preface to a new edition of Aspasio Vindicated (1764), a response to Wesley’s A Preservative against Unsettled Notions in Religion (1758), which was itself a response to James Hervey’s Theron and Aspasio (1755), a spirited defence of the Reformed doctrine of imputed righteousness. In his preface Erskine argued that Wesley had deceived his Scottish Methodist followers, and was hostile towards many of the key tenets of Presbyterianism. ‘Mr Wesley’ Erskine asserted ‘is by no means so orthodox as they have hitherto imagined’ (p. 117). His polemic, suggests Yeager, was decisive in preventing any further Wesleyan success north of the border. According to Yeager, in Erskine’s opinion ‘the smooth-talking Methodist seemed more like a disreputable salesman than a genuine friend to Protestant religion’ (p. 139).

However, Erskine’s key contribution to the Evangelical Revival lay in his role as a disseminator of literature (p. 165). A supporter of the American revolutionaries, Erskine used his links with trans-Atlantic evangelicals to strategic effect. An early correspondent of Jonathan Edwards, he regularly supplied him with the latest theological literature, and later secured the rights to publish a number of Edwards’ key posthumous works. But those who benefitted from his patronage were scattered around the North Atlantic world, and following the American Revolution he paid particular attention to providing books for the new Republic’s main colleges of divinity. The books they received included the predictable works of Reformed and Puritan divinity, but also the latest volumes from the more unorthodox writers of the day, including Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey. His aim was to ensure that his recipients were familiar with the latest theological literature, so that they would be able to ‘strengthen evangelicalism and spread the gospel message’ (p. 197). Like Whitefield before him, Erskine was a religious entrepreneur in the evangelical cause.

Jonathan Yeager has produced an excellent study of the hitherto little known John Erskine. While the study is based on the author’s doctoral thesis, and at times reads like a typical first book, there’s much here that will repay careful reading and thought. Far from being the preserve of Wesley, eighteenth-century evangelical Calvinists were also moulded by the Enlightenment. In their recasting of aspects of Calvinism, Erskine and others breathed fresh life into Reformed theology, attuning it to the more buoyant spirit of the long eighteenth century.

J. E. Lloyd and Welsh History

2011-08-17T19:27:00.053+01:00

I don't often blog about Welsh history here, but one of the most exciting developments in the past couple of years has been the blossoming of interest in the history of history writing on and about Wales. The main pioneer in this has been Neil Evans, but much of his ground-breaking work has been hidden away in various journal articles and essays. Huw Pryce's recently published J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation's Past (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), is the most substantial contrbution to this new sub-genre of Welsh historical studies.

Pryce's superb book does two things. Its first part is a straightforward biography of Lloyd. Born in rural Montgomeryshire, John Edward Lloyd's formative years were spent in prosperous middle-class Welsh communities in Victorian Liverpool. An Oxford education was followed by posts at the newly established universities of Aberystwyth, and then Bangor, where he served as the university Registrar and taught history, pioneering the academic teaching of the history of Wales. His magnum opus, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest (1911), was similarly the first professional 'academic' history of Wales, although it stopped in 1282 with the defeat of Wales' last native Prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and the conquest of Wales by Edward I. Pryce explains why there was no major follow-up to this history, as Lloyd both felt he had said all that he had wanted to say and became increasingly absorbed in university administration. Pryce's study does much to cement the claim, first made by R. T. Jenkins in the early 1940s, that Lloyd 'created Welsh history' (p. 95).

The second half of the book is more analytical, and closely examines Lloyd's approach to history, his intellectual context and his interpretation(s) of the Welsh past.

In his A History of Wales, Lloyd ended his narrative in 1282. Pryce offers some reasons for this, ironically located squarely in Lloyd's view of modern Wales. Like many of his contemporaries Lloyd was working with a Whiggish understanding of historical progress. He saw the eighteenth century Methodist Revival as the key event in the birth of modern Wales: 'through its agency the political and cultural life of Wales was raised to a new level - a new language and a new literature were evolved, new habits altered the routine of daily life, new organizations came into being, and a new social atmosphere was created' (p. 86-7). This new Wales was the Liberal Nonconformist Wales of Lloyd's nineteenth century upbringing. For Lloyd, religion, culture and education were the main carriers of Welsh identity, but this is not to say that he did not see a more political dimension also. The creation of key national institutions he held to be vital to the survival of a distinctive Welsh national identity. This is not to say though that Lloyd was a proto-nationalist, indeed he reacted fairly strongly to Saunders Lewis' overtly nationalistic political vision. For Lloyd, the nineteenth century has seen the evolution of Wales within the British state and Empire - a 'nation reborn' (p. 91).

His A History of Wales was, therefore, a deliberate attempt to look back into the Welsh past, at the origins of the nation: 'the truth is that for the serious historian, who probes beneath the surface and seeks to discern the hidden springs of action, recent history deals only with superficial changes; for fundamentals, one must go back to much earlier times, to mediaeval, and even, it may be, to prehistoric days' (p. 92).

Pryce also looks closely at the Lloyd's methodology. Lloyd's formative years as an historian coincided with the professionalisation of history in Britain. Despite being a close friend of T. F. Tout, famous for his advocacy of 'scientific' history, Lloyd's A History of Wales, did not engage that closely with documentary evidence. Rather he attempted to sift the mass of information, legend and more reliable detail on the Welsh past, in order produce a 'sound and scientific textbook' (p. 97). That's not to say that he didn't see the value of archival work, far from it. Much of his time after the appearance of the History was spent supporting the publishing of sources on the history of Wales housed in various English archives under the imprint of the University of Wales, Board of Celtic Studies. Lloyd's History firmly established the narrative structure of the Welsh past, distilled fact from myth and fable, and provided those who came after with the groundwork upon which to build further investigations.

Lloyd was also genuinely interdisciplinary in his approach, drawing upon recent archaeological evidence for his chapters on prehistoric Wales and the origins of the Welsh people for example. Lloyd's conclusions in area are dealt with fully in a separate chapter of Pryce's study. One of the themes that recurrs in this area as elsewhere in the book was Lloyd's determination to unravel historical fact from legend and myth - something that gained him a reputation as a debunker of long cherished views of the past (p. 101). In two further chapters, Pryce analyses Lloyd's views of Welsh society and his interpretation of the Welsh princes, who he sees as 'nation builders'. In a short section on the Welsh church, Pryce shows how Lloyd maintained a close link between the religious fortunes of the Welsh and their sense of nationality. Both ideas ebbed and flowed through the history of Wales, but Lloyd maintained the existence of 'a distinctive religious sentiment across the medieval centuries', which would 'eventually find expression in the Methodist revival' (p. 149).

Those of us who write Welsh history today therefore stand on Lloyd's shoulders to a greater or lesser extent. While maintaining that he created Welsh history is probably an overstatement, he certainly laid the foundation of it as an academic discipline. In doing this he set himself apart from some of his contemporaries who were more determined to increase the popularity of Welsh history as an integral part of Welsh culture. According to Pryce: 'Lloyd, by seeking to establish Welsh history as an academic discipline endowed with 'scientific' credentials aceptable to a wider world of scholarship, effectively distanced it' from wider Welsh cultural life (p. 173-4).

Disestablishmentarianism and all that!

2011-08-14T18:40:00.000+01:00

Having had a staunch Welsh nonconformist upbringing, and despite a more recent appreciation of all things Anglican, the notion of an established Church of England has not been something which I've ever really begun to appreciate. Indeed, the disestablished Church in Wales has often been seen as a good example of the benefits that might accrue from the process of unhitching the Anglican church from the State, an experience to emulate!

Reading Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby and William Whyte (eds), The Established Church: Past, Present and Future (London: Continuum / Affirming Catholicism, 2011), over the past few days has provoked me to think further about the whole issue of an established Church. The book is a collection of eleven essays, published under the Affirming Catholicism imprint, an organisation that aims to make the catholic voice better heard within the Church of England. There are a mix of essays, historical, political and anthropological, most of which interact with present day questions relating to establishment, as well as engaging with the historical dimension too.

In a sense the historical chapters are the easiest to comment upon. Matthew Grimley provides a helpful overview of the failure of debates over disestablishment since the Prayer Book controversy of 1927-8. The reasons for this he argues have been the virtual disappearance of confessional politics in the twentieth century, and the stability of Britain's institutions of State, following the granting of universal suffrage in 1928. Even more recent constitutional changes have been incremental, cautious and limited. But perhaps more importantly, he argues that it has been the 'plasticity', for which read adaptibility of the Established Church, 'as both as instrument of patriotism' and a 'critic of government policy', which has enabled it to withstand England's transformation into a modern multi-cultural society (p. 54-5).

Andrew Atherstone examines the attitudes of evangelicals to disestablishment, focussing in some detail in the later parts of his chapter on Colin Buchanan's championing of the case since the 1960s.

Mark Chapman's chapter on Anglo-Catholic attitudes towards Establishment was a particular highlight. Largely historical in approach, Chapman, argues that 'the logic of Tractarianism leads towards some form of self-government and a degree of disestablishment' (p. 62). An institution that claimed to possess the authority of the Holy Spirit could hardly submit to the secular State. Chapman also draws upon the writings of the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who has argued in the past that Christianity should grow to accept its minority position. Establishment merely hides or disguises that. Indeed, 'becoming a minority is part of obedience to the gospel' (p. 73). In the title of his chapter: there should be a free Church within a free State. Remarkably this stress on the uniqueness or specialness of the Church suggests considerable common ground between Anglo-Catholics and some evangelicals, at least over Church-State questions.

Other chapters in the book look at the question of Establishment from other perspectives. Judith Maltby uses the debates over the ordination of women priests to examine the changing attitude of parliament to the Church of England. Elaine Graham looks at Establishment and multiculturalism, and engages quite closely with the role that the Established Church has played in recent times combating extreme right-wing politics, and facilitating inter-faith relations. Others chapters look at the attitude of Roman Catholics and Methodists towards Establishment.

Despite a chapter arguing that there are in fact different kinds of Establishment in the British Isles as a whole, its concentration almost exclusively on the Church of Scotland, was something of a missed opportunity. There's very little on Wales in this book. After a long and bitter campaign, the Church of England was disestablished in Wales in 1920. Despite the fears of many, that did not prove to be the death knell to Welsh Anglicanism. Rather the Church in Wales, as it very consciously became, redefined itself as the ancient church of the Welsh people, rather than the imposed Anglican establishment it had once been perceived as being. The rapid decline in Welsh nonconformity in the twentieth century has enabled the Church in Wales to become the single largest, and therefore influential, Christian body in Wales. Disestablishment has been positive, even the making of Welsh Anglicanism!

The book finishes with an excellent concluding chapter by William Whyte, who takes the long view and looks at the future of the Established Church. I found his stress here on the difference between a 'high' establishment and an 'earthed' establishment, an establishment from the bottom-up if you like, very helpful. His challenge to present day Anglicans is to quit mourning for and hankering after a golden age that never really existed, and find new ways of engaging with the State. Again, the example of the Church in Wales might have been telling here!

If Wright is right . . .

2011-08-11T09:45:00.000+01:00

I've read a lot of N. T. (Tom) Wright over the past number of years, and he's certainly worthy of extended and serious reading by all evangelicals. That's not to say he's always easy, or that I always agree with him; indeed over the years I've become increasingly worried at the extent to which much of his writing marks a quite dramatic shift from some historic evangelical positions. Indeed, Wright himself seems to be consciously forcing evangelicals, especially those of a more Reformed hue, to get over the Reformation, and read the New Testament through eyes other than Calvin's, or especially Luther's. This leads him into some quite dramatic reformulations of core doctrines, especially justification by faith, and a questioning of received understandings of the imputed righteousness of Christ.

All this by way preamble to Stephen J. Khurt's, Tom Wright for Everyone: Putting the Theology of N. T. Wright into Practice in the Local Church (London: SPCK, 2011). Khurt has written a superb introduction/overview to Wright's theology, especially useful to those who've never read any Wright, or for those who've tried and not got very far. The key chapter, and one you can read without really reading the rest of the book, is the third, in which Khurt, with some skill, describes the main features of Wright's, often dramatic recasting of evangelical theology.

One of the other good features of this book is Khurt's description of how Wright's theology has impacted Khurt's church in practical terms. Yet its here also that I found most to sigh at. Khurt at times idolizes Wright - there a recurring theme here that, despite being brought within evangelical Anglicanism, Khurt never really understood the gospel until he encountered the theology of Wright - really? Wright appears in these pages as a kind of guru-like figure, delivering simplisitc evangelicals from their inherited readings of Jesus, and especially Paul!

Then there's Khurt's description of the impact of Wright's theology on his local church practice in his parish in Surrey. This seems to be reduced down to things that many churches take for granted. His innovation of the Sssh-free church - basically family services designed to be all-age inclusive - is surely something that is pretty common these days. Do they really need Wright's reworking of evangelical theology to make them possible?

So this is an excellent book in its more theological sections. I got a bit tired of the guru-like presentation of Wright, and a little tired of Khurt - but its a great introduction to Wright and his work!

John Stott's farewell

2011-08-10T09:14:00.000+01:00

To mark the passing of John Stott recently, I thought I'd read his final book, The Radical Disciple: Wholehearted Christian Living (Nottingham: IVP, 2010). Its a pretty slim volume, about 140 pages of fairly large type, and I guess there's little that seasoned Stott readers will not have read before, but its power and persuasiveness really rests in its intent and timing. These are Stott's final words, self-consciously so, to the evangelical movement which he has led with such distinguished grace for much of the past half century and more. In some ways its also a companion volume to his previous book, The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor (2007). Where that book gave Stott's distilled wisdom on the church, this book is a passionate summary of his views on the nature of the Christian life, picking up on many of themes that have moulded his life and ministry.

The book defines a Christian as a radical disciple, and in its eight main chapters, Stott looks at eight characteristics of just such a disciple. These are: nonconformity, Christlikeness, maturity, creation-care, simplicity, balance, dependence and death. I won't talk about all eight here, just comment on a few areas which stood out for me.

Putting aside the initial surprise of an Anglican recommending nonconformity(!!), Stott argues, as he has done throughout his ministry, that Christians should be 'counter-cultural', and he identifies four twenty-first century trends that Christians should resist: pluralism, materialism, ethical relativism and narcissism.

In the third chapter, on maturity, he summarizes the current evangelical world globally as characterised by 'growth without depth' (p. 43). The answer to this immaturity is Christian maturity, which he sees in deeply Christological terms. 'To be mature is to have a mature relationship with Christ in which we worship, trust, love and obey him' (p. 47). To get there 'we need above all a fresh and true vision of Jesus Christ, not least in his absolute supremacy'. And how do find the authentic Jesus? ' . . . in the Bible - the book which could be described as the Father's portrait of the Son painted by the Holy Spirit' (p. 49).

For me, and perhaps for the evangelical world more generally, one of the most radical chapters in the book was that which dealt with simplicity. One of the themes that has emerged in many of the obituaries of Stott in the past couple of weeks has been the extent to which he himself embodied this humble and simple lifestyle. He identifies eight characteristics of the simple life: embracing the goodness of creation, the proper stewardship and sharing of the world's resources. Under this heading he makes the point that 'people's humanity is diminshed if they have no just share in those resources' (p.76), something being played out before our eyes here in the UK as I write (August 2011) with unprecedented levels of rioting and looting on the streets of some of our major cities. The other hallmarks of the simple life: the right attitude to poverty and wealth, our congrgations acting as genuinely new communities, a personal lifestyle embodying holiness, humility, simplicity and contentment, a committment to international development (not just aid and relief), a quest for social justice and peace, personal evangelism and the eager expectation of the Lord's return.

Equally good is Stott's stress on the need for us to live a balanced Christian life. Expounding 1 Peter 2, Stott writes that we should remember who we are as Christians, and then behave accordingly (p. 102). Radical disciples should also embrace the 'dignity of dependence' (p. 113), on Christ certianly, but also on one's fellow Christians. And then the Christian life needs to embrace death. He writes that 'life through death is one of the profoundest paradoxes in both the Christian faith and Christian life' (p. 115). Death is the way to life, he writes, in terms of salvation itself, but also in discipleship, mission, persecution, martyrdom, and as we face our own mortality.

The book draws to a close with a moving ending in which Stott bids his readers 'Farewell' and urges the importance of reading in order to live lives of such radical discipleship. Reading he concludes, is a 'much neglected means of grace' (p. 140).

So while there's little new here, the power of the book rests in the fact that these are the reflections of someone at the end of his earthly pilgrimage. Its a stripped back volume, therefore, concentrating on the essential elements of being a radical, authentic, twenty-first century disciple of Jesus Christ.

Thank you John Stott!

Evangelicals and the Church of England during the Twentieth Century

2011-07-10T17:08:00.001+01:00

I spent Thursday and Friday last week at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, attending a conference on Evangelicals and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century. The conference explored the range of evangelical Anglican identities, but was specifically designed to explore the accuracy of the traditional interpretation of the fortunes of twentieth-century Anglican evangelicalism - that for much of the century evangelicals were marginal figures within the national Church, before the 1967 National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele, the brainchild of John Stott, coaxed them out of their ghettoes, and encouraged greater engagement with the life of their church.

The gathering opened with a paper from David Bebbington (Stirling) on the Islington Clerical Conference, which first convened in 1827 and continued uninterrupted until 1983. The Islington conference was the main event at which Anglican evangelicals came together during this period. The paper took ten snapshots of key conferences, a super way of showing the changing fortunes of evangelicals within the Church and the different expressions of evangelical Anglican identity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Islington, according to Bebbington, was a barometer of evangelical Anglicanism. He also argued that the Islington gathering played an important role in keeping evangelical Anglicans together, the face to face meeting of colleagues every year acting as a check against bitter disagreements and fallings out. But Islington, he argued, also resembled an evangelical Anglican magisterium, at which the evangelical attitude or response to various issues and events was propagated and then taken back to the parishes. In a sense this paper set the agenda for the conference, and many of the other papers explored in more detail some of the points that it raised.

For me perhaps the highlight of the conference was Mark Smith's paper on the development of the evangelical parish in the twentieth century. Charting new ground, Smith attempted to sketch in the narrative development of evangelical parish ministry across the century, something hitherto not attmepted, at least not in such a joined-up way. He took two examples as well to illustrate some of the broader points, Christ Church, Chadderton in Oldham, and St Andrews in north Oxford. Beginning in the eighteenth century, he argued that the evangelical parish in that century was a reaction to the post Restoration parish. The prevailing eighteenth century model had been dominated by baptism and holy living as the key routes to heaven, but evangelicals reacted against this; the parish for them was the theatre or mission field for conversion. By the nineteenth century Thomas Chalmers' influence was key, as was John Bird Sumner who argued that the clergy were ambassadors, who should adopt every scheme possible to encourage conversion. The proliferation of gospel agencies of every kind and description became the norm for the Anglican evangelical parish. Challenges to this model, came from Christopher Chavasse's report, Towards the Conversion of England (1945) which argued for the mobilisation of the laity in the evangelistic endeavour. This was a theme picked up by the Keele Congress in 1967, but it was a combination of the wider availability of higher education and the Charismatic renewal from the 1960s, that shifted the focus in most parishes away from the clergy and very definitely in favour of an articulate laity.There was lots of important new work here; hopefully there'll be a book!

Other highlights included: Matthew Grimley's (Oxford) paper on Evangelicals and Anti-Permissiveness during the 1970s, focussing in particular on the Festival of Light. Andrew Atherstone (Wycliffe) spoke on the Cheltenham/Oxford Conference of Evangelical Churchmen, 1916-76, collating evidence for evangelical engagement with the Church well in advance of the supossed watershed of the Keele Congress. Also excellent was Peter Webster's (Institute of Historical Research) paper on evangelical relations with Archbishop Michael Ramsay. While Martyn Lloyd-Jones might have been reluctant to regard him as a Christian, and Webster begun with Iain Murray's similarly dismissive estimation, there were actually far more similarities between their theological stance than at first appeared, and Ramsay enjoyed good relations with a number of prominent evangelicals.

My own paper was on the evangelical resurgence in the Church in Wales from the late 1960s onwards, providing a comparative perspective. The focus of the paper was the Evangelical Fellowship in the Church in Wales, the brainchild of John Stott and Bertie Lewis, a fellowship which stimulated the remarkable growth inthe number of evangelicals in the Church. Anyway, the paper went fine, but there's still lots more research to do on it yet . . .

Yet another Johnny Cash biography . . .

2011-07-03T16:31:00.000+01:00

I think I've pretty much exhausted my Johnny Cash reading having just finished Michael Streissguth's, Johnny Cash: The Biography (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2006). I'm not sure why I've not read this sooner really, because on balance I think its the best Cash biography out there at the minute by some distance.

Streissguth is a music historian, and that helps to begin with. He has also written about Cash's famous concert at Folsom Prison in 1968 (there's another Cash book to add to the reading list!). Where other books on Cash take a much more encyclopaedic approach, going into detail on every aspect of Cash life, Streissguth is much more sparring, and all the better for it! There's also a more welcome sense of detachment with this biography; while there's certainly sympathy and understanding for his subject, Streissguth is also more ready to cut through many of the myths that have grown up around Cash, both during his lifetime and after. Its not that this is an unpleasant bebunking of Cash, far from it, but Streissguth does manage to present Cash with all his flaws, realistically, with ever stoop to cynicism. The tone befits what is really the most academically rigorous study of Cash's life.

While Streissguth doesn't overdo his discussion of Cash's long-standing drug problems, he leaves the reader in no doubt that Cash never really got over his addiction issues.His happiest period seems to have been between his marriage to June Carter and the mid 1970s, but after that recurring bouts of addiction became normal. Streissguth is also excellent on Cash's childhood, doing a good job evoking his upbringing in the Arkansas cotton fields. Also helpful is his realistic discussion of the Rick Rubin period. Streissguth is more sceptical about some of the material on this series of albums, seeing the second of them, Unchained (1996), which saw Cash in tandem with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, as the most genuinely representative of the Cash sound. American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002) comes in for a bit of stick, with the exception of the title track; quite what he'd make of volumes five and six, the two posthumous albums, I'm not sure!

Where he's also quite decent is on the religious aspects of Cash life. There's not much on Cash's supposed 'conversion', or rededication following his crawl into the Nickajack caves in 1967, Streissguth prefers to see the birth of his son John Carter Cash as the real turning point. But there's quite a lot here on his relationship with Billy Graham, and also a fair bit on the pastor, Jack Shaw, he took with him on some of his tours in the later 1970s and '80s.

So, I'm still mulling over whether there's any scope in doing some on this myself . . .

More reflections on M. Wynn Thomas', In the Shadow of the Pulpit (2010).

2011-06-21T23:56:00.035+01:00

I said that I'd return and comment again, in a slightly more reflective way, on M. Wynn Thomas', In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010). So having now read the whole of it, what do I think?

Well to begin with the book has been extremely well received, even nominated for the Wales Book of the Year award this year (http://www.literaturewales.org/the-long-list/). So it going to be very influential in framing contemporary views on Wales' nonconformist heritage. Its a fine book in many ways, richly detailed, erudite and certainly an excellent read. But there are a number of problems with it.

Firstly, its a work of literary criticism in the main, and needs to be read as such. Its not primarily a work of history, leave alone theology. Having said that, and despite the inclusion of a bluffers guide to nonconformity as its first chapter, the book really needed a more thorough earthing in the best contemporary scholarship, both historical and theological, on Welsh nonconformity. This would help clear away some of the more obvious outdated and plainly simplistic interpretations.

The main analytical sections in the book are based on close readings of a wide array of early twentieth century Anglo-Welsh writers, Idris Davies, Gwyn Thomas, Caradoc Evans, Dylan Thomas all figure prominently, the vast majority having reacted against their nonconformists upbringings to a greater or lesser extent. While these authors certainly paint a rich picture, or at least one picture of nonconformist Wales in the early twentieth century, I wonder how representative it really is? The picture that emerges from their writings is of a nonconformist Wales that was dark and oppressive, the result of a grim Calvinistic theology, where most ministers and chapel elders were hypocrites, who said one thing and did another, especially where sexual morality was concerned. Whilst I wouldn't want to doubt that picture in its entirety, like most caricatures it has enough truth in it to give it some resonance, but again how representative is it?

Its here of course that the historical and theological dimensions are so necessary. The Welsh nonconformity depicted by these writers was the Victorian variety, that highly respectable, middle class religion is seen as being normative in Thomas' account. But was it? Again its here that the problems with the books engagement with Calvinism are problematic, since by the early twentieth century, or even before that, the heyday of Calvinism had long since passed. Was it Calvinism these writers were reacting against, or was it hypocritical Victorian respectability?

For a more positive analysis/interpretation/assessment of Welsh nonconformity, Thomas turns to the voice of the novelist Emyr Humphreys, for a final chapter which he subtitles: 'The Chapels write back'. While Humpheys is certainly a major interpreter of twentieth century nonconformity, his perspective is again not without its problems. While rightly pinning many of the endemic problems within nineteenth century nonconformity onto the scurrilous attacks of the 1847 Blue Books, attacks which forced the nonconformist leadership along the road of middle class respectability, Humphreys sees the accomodation with the English incomers as the biggest problem. It was nonconformity's 'devil's bargain with that culturally threatening language' (pp.297-8), that hollowed out Welsh Dissent of, well of its dissenting tradition. For Humphreys then the essence of nonconformity was the ability to dissent from the status quo, but from the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Welsh nonconformity accomodated itself to English bourgeois culture, and of course the English language. The true twentieth century heirs of the nonconformist tradition for Humphreys were therefore the founders of Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Language Society. Nonconformist decline is therefore equated, to a greater or lesser extent, with Anglicisation. Of course, there are elements of truth to this, but a much more careful theological interpretation is also necessary; the reality was that the evangelical theological heart had been ripped out of Welsh nonconformity by the early twentieth century, in its place all that remained was a socially based moralism and a little later Welsh nationalism. Decline was inevitable, and that decline was not unique to Wales by any means! The real inheritors of Wales' nonconformist past were now to be found elsewhere, and not necesarily always within the mainline Welsh denominations.

My biggest problem with the book then is the lack of nuance, a lack born of an incomplete grasp of the historical context, informed by the latest scholarship, and a lack of engagement with theology, with belief. Thomas' book then, while informative as regards the attitudes of these early twentieth century Anglo-Welsh writers towards Welsh nonconformity, should be read as just that - the way in which some disaffected Anglo-Welsh writers came to terms with their nonconformsit upbringings. It should not be read as a rounded interpretation of Wales' nonconformist past.

Thomas' picture should, therefore, not be read back into earlier generations of Welsh nonconformity without significant qualification.

Celebrating Dylan's 70th

2011-06-19T21:36:00.001+01:00

Having immersed myself in the music of Bob Dylan over the past year or so, I thought I'd take the opportunity of his recent seventieth birthday to do two things; listen to his entire back catalogue in chronological order, the good stuff and the not so good!, and read a full biography, the kind that attempts to separate fact from myth and pure fiction.

My considered verdict on the albums, well I still think Blood on the Tracks (1974) is impossible to beat, although John Wesley Harding (1967) does run it close. I do also keep going back again and again to Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Bringing it all Back Home (1965), but then I've also got a soft spot for the three Christian albums from the late 1970s and early '80s too - Gotta Serve Somebody (1979), Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981). I try not to say this too often or too publicly . . . .

Finding the biography wasn't difficult. Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (revised edition, 2011), in a newly updated edition, the original having appeared about a decade ago, seemed to be in every bookshop I walked into! It seemed the obvious place to start.

When it first appeared Sounes' study was marketed as a warts and all portrait, and while it certainly has a few revelations, particularly Dylan's 'secret' second marriage to one of his backing singers in the 1980s, there nothing much else especially exciting. Its basically a run through, at quite some speed, despite its almost 400 pages of the main phases of Dylan's life. Its best on the 1960s inevitably, and is pretty good on the background and process of the making of the various Dylan albums, all of which are interspersed with domestic details and material on his incessant touring.

Yet its a pretty disappointing book in the final analysis, and one that I got increasingly frustrated with the more I read. Sounes is a journalist primarily, something reflected in the writing style, but it also protrudes into the tone of the book too. While, hagiography is always best avoided, and there's already plenty of that surrounding Dylan, the scepticism, even scorn, that characterises Sounes' narrative, intrudes too much on the narrative. While Dylan's comments need always to be treated with care and sometimes taken with a hefty pinch of salt, Sounes seems too ready to believe the invective of some of Dylan's one time friends, over the words of the man himself. So Sounes quotes with what appears to be approval the view that: 'perhaps the songwriter was ten times the man Bob was in real life' (p. 445). There's plenty more along the same lines.

I also wonder whether Sounes actually likes any of Dylan's music. Almost all of his albums are damned with pretty faint praise. Again there's plenty of hype over much of Dylan's music, so a degree of critical engagement is refreshing, but Sounes hardly comes over as someone with much appreciation of Dylan's talents. He appears more the professional biographer, than a writer with a real empathy for his subject.

The book certainly has its merits. It gives a good overview of Dylan's life for sure, but its just not intellectually engaging - not enough anyway! There's not enough on Dylan's intellectual influences, surely essential to a proper biography? So I'm wondering where to go next with my Dylan reading - anyone got any recommendations?

Just a little advance Lloyd-Jones publicity . . .

2011-06-15T11:30:00.002+01:00

I've recently received a copy of the front cover of the new volume of essays on Martyn Lloyd-Jones which I've been working over the past few months.

It contains 14 chapters on various aspects of Lloyd-Jones' life and ministry, including chapters on Lloyd-Jones and Wales, Lloyd-Jones and Revival, Lloyd-Jones and the Charismatic Controversy, and Lloyd-Jones and Fundamentalism, to name just a few.

The plan is that the volume will be published by IVP in the early Autumn of this year. Watch this space for further details . . .

New book on Jonathan Edwards

2011-06-08T21:03:00.000+01:00

I guess you never really get over the initial excitement of seeing your name in print; this morning I received a copy of my latest publication, a chapter in a new volume of essays edited by Kenneth P. Minkema, Adriaan C. Neele and Kelly Van Andel, on Jonathan Edwards and Scotland (Edinburgh: Denedin Academic Press, 2011).

The book has grown out of the conference on the same subject held at the University of Glasgow in Easter 2009, a gathering sponsored by the Jonathan Edwards Centre at Yale in the United States. There are eleven chapters, most of them, as the title suggests explore Edwards' relationship with Scotland, or the ways in which Edwards was read by various Scots.

My chapter offers a complimentary angle to the rest of the chapters in the book, looking at Edwards' influence in Wales, particularly in the early stages of the Welsh evangelical revival, but also on the writings of William Williams, Pantycelyn, who in many respects re-wrote Edwards for a Welsh-language audience. Its only a short paper, but contributes something I hope to our understanding of the international dimensions of the Welsh Methodist Revival. While that movement was certainly Wales' first indigenous and popular Protestant religious movment, it was in intellectual terms deeply embedded in the wider evangelical community. This paper, in a sense the final spin-off from my doctoral dissertation, explores those international dimensions of the movement a little further.

The only problem is that at close on £70, a second mortage may be necessary to actually purchase a copy!

Ranting about Calvinism . . .

2011-05-17T15:03:00.000+01:00

The publication of a new book on Welsh nonconformity is usually the kind of thing that sets my pulse racing that little bit faster . . . honestly!

Yet I've been a little bit reluctant to start M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (2010) for some reason. But start it I did yesterday, and rather than wait until I've finished reading the whole of it before blogging, I might as well blog on it as regular intervals instead! Thomas is a literary critic, and so he approaches Welsh nonconformity through the lens of predominantly English language fictional writing on nineteenth and twentieth century Welsh religious life. I've read the first two chapters; its a terrific read. The introductory chapter, in particular, in which Thomas weaves the story of his grandmother's involvement in the 1904-5 Welsh revival, as one of the band of women that accompanied Evan Roberts, is particuarly poignant.

However, in both the introduction and in the pages of his first substantive chapter, 'A bluffers guide to Nonconfomist Wales', my hackles have been raised! Why? Well the caricatures of Calvinism mainly. So here we have Gwilym Hiraethog distancing himself from what Thomas call High Calvinism after a close friend had been chillingly turned out of his local congregation after visiting his seriously ill wife on a Sunday. A tragic example of the spirit of Welsh nonconformity by the end of the nineteenth century certainly, but a result of High Calvinism? Thomas writes that Hiraethog's friend had 'broken the chilly High Calvinist rule governing Sabbath behaviour' (p. 11). The problem is, of course, that Sabbatarianism of this kind, far from being a result of Calvinism, was more a consequence of Victorian respectability. You did't have to be a Calvinist to be such an unbending Sabbatarian!

I'm afraid that the pejorative language continues into the next chapter. There we have a Calvin - 'the great divider of the elect from the goats and grimly unbending believer in predestination' (p. 22), and 'the formidable city boss of theocratic Geneva' (p. 22). Such unhelpful generalisations, no longer reflected in the most recent historical literature, lead to crudely drawn caricatures of nonconformist Wales.

I'll keep blogging my reflections anyway. Rant over . . . . .

Neglecting the blog!

2011-05-03T21:47:00.000+01:00

I guess the thing that makes any blog a success is regular updates, but over the past couple of months I've failed miserably in posting new material. Sorry readers, sorry blog for neglecting you! So instead I've given it a little bit of redesign, a relaunch, if you like, and the promise to try and update a little more often.

To be fair, I've had good excuses for the lack of blogging activity. Its been a hectic term, with tons of teaching, but also lots of writing. My book on Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales is finished. Called The Elect Methodists, it should be out later this year. And the book on Martyn Lloyd-Jones is also finished and with the publishers; that'll be published in the early Autumn - so watch this space on both counts!

And now stretching out into the summer is a long list of writing projects. First up is a paper on evangelicals in the Church of Wales during the last fifty years of so. It'll focus on the activities of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Church of Wales, and try to up-pick the increasing confidence of evangelicalsin the Chruch in the past fifty years or so. The initial paper will be for a conference at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, on Evangelicals in the Church of England in the Twentieth Century, so it'll be good to try out ideas there, and then revise it a bit later for publication.Then there's the introduction to evangelicalism to crack on with. The Fire Divine: Introducing Evangelicalism, is the next significant book project, and I'm intending it as a follow up to Mike Reeves', The Unquencheable Flame: Introducing the Reformation (IVP, 2009). Its intended as a popular introduction to evangelicalism, with an eighteenth century focus. I'm guessing that it'll be a very different book to write, and a bit of a challenge!

As to reading there's been plenty, but I've just not had opportunity to write up the book reviews. Ive just finished a new book on Johnny Cash. Graeme Thomson's, The Resurrection of Johnny Cash: Hurt, Redemption and American Recordings (2011), is the first detailed study of the final creative phase in Cash's career, the six albums produced under Rick Rubin's guidance from the early 1990s. Its a terrific study, and as well as detailed analyses of the six albums, contains some excellent material on Cash cabaret years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its got me thinking seriously again about writing something on Cash's religious views and pilgrimage. I'm wondering whether a possible way into the subject may be a look at Cash's relationship with Billy Graham, using the Graham archive at Wheaton College, and then looking at some of Cash's more religious output as well.

And I've been reading Hans Kung's autobiography as well. I might write about it at more length later on, but its been a bit of slog to get through it to be honest. I guess the main reason for that is that its a translation from the original German, so the writing style, lots of long convoluted sentences, can take a bit of getting used to. The first volume Hans Kung: My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs (2004), majors on his early development and the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. I've about a 100 pages to go. While its worthwhile reading, and certainly gives a really valuable insight into contemporary Roman Catholicism, or at least one expression of it, I may leave it a few months before tackling the second volume, which is about double the size of the first one!

Well, it feels good to have got back into the blog. Now I've just got to keep up the posts . . .

Anglicans, this is our day!

2011-01-23T17:11:00.000Z

Having in recent years made my own pilgrimage into Anglicanism, I awaited my copy of Todd D. Hunter's, The Accidental Anglican: The Surprising Appeal of the Liturgical Church (IVP, 2010) with some anticipation; having read it in two sittings practically, I'm left in two minds.

Hunter has the best American charismatic evangelical pedigree. Having first worked in Calvary Chapel circles, he followed John Wimber as the head of the Vineyard Movement following Wimber's untimely death in 1997, and then headed up ALPHA in the US until 2008. But in a sense that's only the beginning of the story. Having planted churches, seemingly everywhere, he planned on an early retirement, which is where the Anglican story really picks up, as Hunter moved quickly, in little over two years, to joining the Anglican church, being ordained priest and then consecrated a bishop by the Anglican Mission under the oversight of Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, with special responsibility for church planting in California and the US West Coast. So an accidental Anglican certainly, but also perhaps a whirlwind Anglican too!

The first half of the book is largely biographical, and charts the story outlined above, which if I'm honest I found less satisfying than the second half in which Hunter outlines some of his reasons for his conversion to all things Anglican. Some of this is much more convincing than others. I'll just comment on a couple of the most impressive areas.

Hunter cites the influence of N. T. Wright at some length. Wright, he says has been helping him reassess what it means to be a Christian over the last decade or so - in a good way. Much of evangelicalism is obsessed by the simple gospel, getting to heaven when we die, or Jesus giving my life some purpose or whatever, and little else. Wright's theology gives us a much bigger picture of God's story in the world - the outworking of redemption in history in effect - 'God announcement to the world that he is indeed its wise, loving and just creator; that through Jesus he has defeated the powers that corrupt and enslave it; and that by his Spirit he is at work to heal and renew it (p. 84). Hunter sees the Anglican liturgy and lectionary as playing a key role in creating this big picture of God's plan for humanity, as it takes congregations through the Bible's story line year after year. Anglicanism tells the Bible's story every year in its liturgy, and proclaims it to the world (p. 88). Excellent.

The best bit of the book is the chapter in which he describes the Anglican treasure chest 'of tools for contemporary evangelism and spiritual formation' (p.113). These are: its ancient liturgical rhythms, the Book of Common Prayer, the Lectionary, the common profession of faith in the saying of the Creed, the weekly prayer of confession and absolution, the communal offering of peace to one another, the Eucharist, the stress on an ordained ministry and the Anglican love of comprehensiveness. Most of which are of course merely a desciption of all the key elements of the average Anglican service!

But it is perhaps the spirit of Anglicanism that Hunter ends up commending most. Its 'sweet reasonableness'. This is a characteristic he has witnessed at first hand, in Anglican evangelicals like John Stott and Jim Packer, and more recently by Sandy Millar of Holy Trinity, Brompton. What does he mean by 'sweet reasonableness'? Hunter writes: 'Historically, Anglicanism does not bully but simply sets itself forth. It invites participation, contemplation and conversation. This is a great gift to the post-modern, post-Christendom situation' (p. 109).

So while there are bits of this book that do grate a little, there are a few areas where Hunter has real insight into the heart of Anglicanism and its possible contemporary relevance.

Assessing Martyn Lloyd-Jones

2010-12-20T21:44:00.003Z

After eighteen months of planning and lots of research and writing, the 'Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Life and Legacy' conference took place at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, at the end of last week. We had 13 papers over two days, a mix of longer, specially invited keynote papers, and shorter addresses arranged in panels of two or three papers around a common theme.

Lloyd-Jones polarises opinion sharply, sometimes very sharply indeed, even a full thirty years after his death. For some he has already practically been canonised, while for others he remains a controversial even divisive figure, unfairly criticised as being the person who shattered the unity of British evangelicalism in the later 1960s. There has been very little scholarly, for that read objective and analytical, study of him. Much of the literature has been pretty hagiographic, aimed at explaining and defending him and the positions which he took thoroughout his life, often in the light of more recent concerns and developments. The conference was therefore designed to be a thoughtful and critical, in the best sense of the term, assessement of Lloyd-Jones and his legacy. It ended up being a sympathic gathering which duly noted Lloyd-Jones' undoubted influence and drew attention to some of his real insights, but also tried to address some of the areas where his legacy has been more mixed and perhaps less helpful.

Without going over all of the papers in detail here, in my closing summing up of the conference I outlined six of the main themes that had been uppermost in our thoughts over the two days.

1. The first of these was the matter of context. Much of the work on Lloyd-Jones stresses that he, largely singled-handedly, brought about a renewal of Reformed theology within 1950s evangelicalism. David Bebbington traced the roots of this renewal, and showed that far from him being responsible for that renewal, Lloyd-Jones actually benefitted from a much longer resurgence in Reformed theology that went back to the start of the 1930s at least.

2. The first section of the conference addressed theological themes. Densil Morgan examined the extent to which Lloyd-Jones was really a Calvinist, and argued that in many of his emphases he was more of an eighteenth-century evangelical than a genuine exponent of the Reformed faith. We then had a series of papers which assessed Lloyd-Jones against a number of different theological types. Robert Pope examined his fundamentalist credentials, and then in two shorter papers, one on his views on theological education and the other on his engagement with modern theology, more evidence of that fundamentalism seemed to be presented. In a very revealing late evening paper, William Kay gave compelling evidence of his Pentecostal and Charismatic credentials, and insightfully explored the way in which Lloyd-Jones' pneumatology has been influential for some of the key leaders of British charismatic evangelicalism, Terry Virgo most obviously.

3. I spoke on Lloyd-Jones and Wales, focussing mainly on how his influence in Wales was mediated in the main through the Evangelical Movement of Wales. Then, not without difficulty and with some trepidation, I tried to examine the way in which Lloyd-Jones' legacy has cast a very large shadow over much of Welsh evangelicalism. My comments on the almost cultic status of Lloyd-Jones in Wales, understandably, didn't go down all that well with some delegates, but its perhaps precisely in some of these areas that assessment needs most to be made.

4. We had an American doctoral student from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Ben Baillie, give an excellent paper on Lloyd-Jones' preaching, drawing out some of the 'abominations', for which read modern innovations, which Lloyd-Jones thought had destroyed preaching since the end of the nineteenth century.

5. We then focused on Lloyd-Jones and secession. Andrew Atherstone looked at the reaction to Lloyd-Jones' 1966 unity call among Anglicans, in the end giving a much more positive interpretation of his appeal.

6. We rounded everything of with an outstanding paper on Lloyd-Jones' reading of the Puritans, which really ended up being an analysis of how Lloyd-Jones, and other evangelicals, use history selectively to serve present-day concerns.

There's much more that could be said, but now its down to getting the book ready for the press. We're intending a collection of 12-14 essays in a book entitled Engaging with Lloyd-Jones, which is scheduled for publication by IVP in the Autumn 2011. Watch this space . . .!

A Calvin marathon . . . . .

2010-11-12T15:16:00.000Z

For the past couple of months, I've been meeting with two really good friends to study John Calvin's, Institiutes of the Christian Religion (1536). We reached our first milestone last night - getting to the end of book one, the book that deals with the knowledge of God as creator, preserver and governor of the world.

The whole enterprise was a bit daunting at first, the most up-to-date edition of the Institutes runs to almost 2,000 pages in length, but we're using a really excellent study guide, Anthony N. S. Lane's, A Reader's Guide to Calvin's Institutes (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009). This helpfully breaks up the original text into thirty studies, pin-pointing the key sections of the Institutes to read each week, rather than face the onerous task of reading through some of the more obscures and rhetorical sections, not to mention all the anti-Catholic bits too!

A different one of us leads each week, summarising the content of the section and asking some key questions to get our discussion going. It didn't take us too long to get into the swing of it, and to begin to grapple with some of the hard questions. Last night's session on providence proved particuarly thorny, not so much because we disagreed with Calvin, but because we just found the implications of providence as defined by Calvin so all-encompassing as to be staggering!

So next week we start book 2, on the knowledge of God as redeemer. Only another year or so to go . . . .!!

Wondering whether I'm a Christian hipster . . . !

2010-11-07T10:17:00.000Z

I've been reading Brett McCracken's critique of the emerging/cool/lefty Christian movement in the US over the last few days - Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Colide (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010). There've been plenty of critiques of the emerging church over the past few years, the most far reaching being Don Carson's pretty scathing, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (2005), but McCracken's book has the decided advantage of being written by a self-professed cool hipster Christian, so its the critique of an insider, and therefore all the more insightful for that.

So am I a hipster Christian - umm, well, I doubt it!

So what does a hip Christian look like? Well McCracken defines them by what they like. They like music, movies and books, Christian or not, well respected by their artistic communities. Thomas a Kempis, C. S. Lewis, Stanley Hauerwas, Jim Wallis, N. T. Wright all figure prominently. They loved movies and music (one good thing about reading the book is that I've discovered Sufjan Stevens' music - more of that in a later blog perhaps).They love acting Catholic,and are often fascinated by Eastern Orthodoxy. They love poetry readings, worshipping with candles, good wine, smoking a lot, breaking taboos - like dressing accordign to the latest trends, and in some cases more unusually, getting tattoos, and buying organic food! They like working for churches, or other non-profit charitable organisations. You get the picture . . .

The book has three main parts. In the first McCracken gives a history of 'cool', non-Christian and Christian, tracing it all the way back to the Enlightenment - surprise, surprise!! He then describes what contemporary Christian cool looks like, before rounding off the discussion with a lengthy personal critique. However, I couldn't help but feel that the book actually blurred its categories at times. Much of the book discusses the various champions of emerging Christianity and its multiplicity of spin-offs, but then McCraken seems to want to talk in more general terms about Christianity and coolness. These are surely two very different things? This is exemplifed in the place given to Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church in Seattle. For McCracken, Driscoll is certainly hip and cool, but where Driscoll departs from the emerging conversation is in his adoption of a very uncool theology - Calvinism, complementarianism, and an unshakable confidence in that very uncool method of communication, preaching. Driscoll dresses up old theology in contemporary clothes, but its still very traditional theology. The emerging crowd by contrast says that it's the theology and message that needs redefining to connect with the twenty-first century hipster crowd. This is surely the thinking behind Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis (2006) and much of the writing of Brian McClaren. Can Calvinism and th emerging conversation both be cool? Maybe what seems cool on the surface is just that . . . cool on the surface.

I thought, though, that McCracken's final section where he offers some critique of the hipster Christianity phenomenon was the most valuable part of the book. For this assessement he has come in for some stick, especially for his apparently simple conclusion that what hipsters are really after is just 'authenticity', the form that that 'authenticity' takes matters very little. But that would be to underestimate the extent or perceptiveness in McCracken's critique. In his assessment McCraken shows a large indebtedness to David Wells, The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers and Emergents in the Postmodern World (2008), which is no bad thing. He ends up offering a series of pretty far-reaching criticisms: the 'goal of becoming a cool church almost always costs more than it is worth and frequently results in an inadvertently uncool Christianity' (p. 190). Christianity and cool may actually be mutually exclusive he says in one place (p. 191). Christiantity is much more radical than trendy hipness. Christianity is only cool, he argues, when it celebrates all thats good because its good, not cool; when its focussed on Jesus, not Jesus as a way of reinforcing our individuality; when its different from the world, not breathlessly trying to catch it up, and when its willing to say no to sin. McCracken concludes:

The desire to be cool, hip, fashionable, and recognized . . . its all a vain pursuit and a waste of time. It comes from a very human place, but its a distraction and a self destructing futility. Our instinct towards cool will only be satisfied in Christ. As new creations, saved by grace and guided by the Holy Spirit, we are called to lives of selflessness and love and renewal. Here - in service of Christ and with God as the centre and core of our being - our identities become more fully realized than we've ever known (p. 247).

Now that's Christian cool . . . . !!

Thinking . . . . . about thinking

2010-10-13T20:52:00.000+01:00

I've just finished reading John Piper's latest book: Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Leicester: IVP, 2010). As with all that Piper produces, this book pulsates with his characterstic passion for God and the same close and rigorous analysis and application of Scripture. Too often Christian's trot out the mantra that theology is just head knowledge and what's really needed is heart knowledge. Piper blows that kind of thinking out of the water:

This book . . . is a plea to reject either-or thinking when it comes to head and heart, thinking and feeling, reason and faith, theology and doxology, mental labour and the ministry of love. It is a plea to see thinking as a necesary, God-ordained means of knowing God (p. 15).

The book is heartily recommended, of course, but would probably be of particular help to Christians embarking on university study, and especially, perhaps, to those engaged in advance study at postgraduate level.

There have been a number of books in recent years that have berated evangelicals for their anti-intellectualism and low view of the life of the mind. Mark Noll's, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) and Os Guinness', Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals don't think and what to do about it (1994) and Harry Blamires, The Post-Christian Mind (2001), each in their own way attempt to show, in Noll's now oft-quoted words, that the scandal of the evangelical mind is precisely that there is not much of an evangelical mind whatsoever. Piper's attempt to address this deficiency differs from the other books mentioned above in that its more obviously biblical and expositional in its approach.

After an interesting semi-autobiographical account and a paean of praise to Piper's hero, Jonathan Edwards, the book moves on to deal with a series of sub-themes. He firstly shows the place of thinking, the place of the mind, in conversion and faith - coming to faith through thinking - he calls it! He then looks at what it means to love God with all our minds, opening up Jesus' famous summary of the responsiblities of the law. Again Piper's definition is typical:

'our thinking should be wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things'.

There then follows two extensive discussions about two areas that prevent fully biblical thinking among evangelicals. The one being the challenge of the relativism that pervades the West in the twenty-first century, the other, a perennial pitfall for evangelicals - anti-intellectualism. Here he looks in detail at two biblical statements that seem on the surface to encourage an anti-intellectual attitude: 'I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children' (Luke 10: 17), and the Apostle Paul's assertion that gospel of Christ makes 'foolish the wisdom of the world' (1 Corinthians 1: 21). Both are explore in detail, and in Piper's hands shown to be to obstacle to serious intellectual effort.

Its a book full of insightful nuggets, reflections on Scripture, and illustrations from Church history. As with all Piper's books its well worth serious thought and prolonged meditation.

As Summer slowly fades into Autumn . . . .

2010-09-28T23:13:00.000+01:00

The surest sign that Summer is almost over is the arrival of hordes of new students into Aberystwyth. Well, they've arrived this week, and there are more of them and they seem younger looking than ever before! This week is a brief lull before teaching starts proper next week.

The research has gone well over the summer. I think I got done most of what I wanted. The John Elias and moderate Calvinism article is finished. It inevitably took longer than I'd anticipated, but the extra fresh research has been worthwhile, I think. I presented a version of it as the annual historical lecture of the Presbyterian Church of Wales at their annual assembly at the beginning of September, and it seemed to work well, and was well received, as far as one can tell with these things! Apart from that I've finished an essay on Jonathan Edwards' influence in Wales for the book of essays that's being published on the back of the Edwards and Scotland conference that I attended last year in Glasgow. And, even more importantly, my next book, a history of English and Welsh Calvinistic Methodism is on the verge of being submitted to the University of Wales Press. I've written it with two colleagues, Drs Boyd Schelnther and Eryn White and our title is: The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735-1811. It should be out fairly early next year.

So today I've started the next research project. This is my paper for the conference I've organised with Andrew Atherstone at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, in December on the life and legacy of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I'm giving a keynote paper on Lloyd-Jones, Wales and Welsh Evangelicalism, but there's a hefty amount of research and careful thought needed before I put pen to paper. Not least of which is how an Anglican ordinand begins to assess Lloyd-Jones influence, which became increasingly sectarian and marginalised in Wales towards the end of his life.

The ordination training has started proper as well. I'm not doing a formal qualification thankfully, but do have to do a range of modules over the next couple of years. At the moment its one called 'The Bible in the Contemporary World', basically a whistle-stop introduction to modern academic critical biblical studies. Its not great, and runs with a view of Scripture which is diametrically oppossed to my own, but I'm learning patience, and am trying to take what's good and useful from it. I also start my first training placement on Sunday, in Holy Trinity Church, Aberystwyth, a more traditional, in terms of worship style, evangelical Anglican church than the one I usually attend. I'm looking forward to it, there should be lots of further opportunities to preach and lead worship, so lots of chance to develop and refine those skills further in the coming months.

So plenty going on at the minute; just got to salvage a few more teaching-free days to get the new research up and running.

Discovering Karl Barth

2010-08-12T10:25:00.000+01:00

Like many evangelicals, I guess, I'd be warned off Karl Barth long ago. Possibly having something to do with my adolescent theological infatuation with Martyn Lloyd Jones, who dismissed Barth as a liberal and an apologist for ecumenism (see here for a typical analysis, an article from an old edition of Evangelical Times: http://www.metropolitantabernacle.org/Sword-And-Trowel/Sword-and-Trowel-Articles/The-Significance-of-Karl-Barth), both gross over simplifications, by the way!

Anyway, I've not ventured into reading Barth himself yet, the thirteen volume Church Dogmatics is just too daunting. A few years ago I read John Webster's, Karl Barth (2004), one of those short introductions, but I didn't get on that well with it to be honest. Densil Morgan has just published a new introduction, which is just that bit more accessible than Webster. His The SPCK Introduction to Karl Barth (2010), is a superb overview of the main themes of his theology, being in effect a short-hand introduction to the Church Dogmatics, interspersed with some biographical material as well.

I've been mulling over his theology of the Word of God over the past couple of days. He argues for a threefold doctrine of the Word of God: preaching or proclamation, scripture and revelation are argued to be three unified forms of the Word of God - written scripture being merely a human witness to the risen Christ. While I'm not sure I'd go that far, his stress on the dynamic Word of God is certainly something that does more justice to the interplay of Word and Spirit in the proclamation of the Gospel, than many more obviously evangelical formulations. Barth writes that preaching may become the Word of God, not through anything we do, but through the sovereign action of God and his direction. I'm not saying I agree entirely, but maybe Barth was onto something here?

I've also been reading a few books on doctrine which use a Barthian perspective quite freely. Densil Morgan's A Humble God: The Basics of Christian Belief (2005) is certainly brief, but its a really useful primer. I'm also about to start reading Colin Gunton, again heavily indebted to Barth. All of this reading, of course, is part of my Anglican training which is just beginning to pick up now!

Anyway, I'm exploring Barth further and have started reading an excellent volume of essays by a group of evangelical scholars who engage with various aspects of Barth's theological position. Its Sung Wook Chung (ed.), Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences (2006), and is well worth careful consideration. I did also come across an IVP volume on Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (2008), which might be worth a look too. There's also the new volume on Barth's influence in Britain: Densil Morgan, Barth Reception in Britain (2010), which is as much about the history of theology in twentieth century Britain as it is about Barth himself, so it'll be a must read as well. But I've enough Barth to keep me going for a while . . .

Detained by US Immigration . . . . . .

2010-07-28T21:24:00.000+01:00

Well, I'm just back from a week in the United States - Washington to be precise - attending a conference and doing a bit of sight-seeing on the side as well! The conference was the bi-annual North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History, and was held this time at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, just a couple of miles outside of DC itself.

It didn't start off on the best footing to be honest - after an inordinately long flight - or so it seemed - I was detained for three hours by US Immigration! Held in a room with others, all Black or Arab it has to be said, watched by fully tooled-up immigration officials who were deciding whether or not to admit my fellow detainees into America. Anyway it was just a mix-up with my fingerprints not matching the ones they had on record from my previous visits, so it only took a couple of minutes to sort out once I was actually seen!

The conference itself was a little mixed, I guess. I had orgainsed a panel of three papers with two friends from Bangor, Prof. Densil Morgan and Dr Robert Pope, on Trans-Atlantic Currents in Welsh Non-conformity. I spoke on Jonathan Edwards' influence in Wales, especially on the parallels between him and William Williams, Pantycelyn. Densil spoke on Henry Rees' trip to the US in the late 1830s in order to establish Calvinistic Methodism there, while Robert spoke on evangelicals and the social gospel in the US and Wales - a comparative paper that majored on J. Gresham Machen's visits to R. B. Jones' Porth Bible College in the 1920s and 1930s. The panel worked really well, I think. We had a good audience, and the whole panel showed clearly some of the trans-Atlantic currents across the three centuries we covered. Some scope for further investigation of that theme in future - possibly.

The other panel that impressed me consisted of three papers on different Welsh-American settlers, who achieved fame/notoriety to some degree or other. Wyn James from Cardiff spoke on Evan Rowland Jones, a Welshman who had a distinguished career in the Northern Yankee army during the Civil War, reaching the rank of Major, before returning home and representing Carmarthen Boroughs for the Liberal Party in the 1890s. Bill Jones, again of Cardiff, spoke on John Griffith, 'Gohebydd', a journalist for Baner ac Amserau Cymru whose letters from post-Civil war America were influential in Wales, particularly in the run-up to the 1868 Reform Act. But the most interesting of all was John Ellis' paper on Owen Rhoscomyl, a remarkable figure who spent much of the 1880s on the America Frontier living the life of a outlaw, before returning to Wales, serving in the Boer War, and being behind much of the faux pagentry at the enthronment of George, son of Edward VII, as Prince of Wales in 1906, and the National Pageant of Wales, a cheesy re-enactment of some of the more glorious moments in early Welsh history, held in Cardiff in 1909.

So a mixed conference, but a few real highlights!

We had a couple of days for sight-seeing then. Got pretty close to the White House, did the National Mall and its various monuments, and went in a couple of the big national museums, the one dedicated to Native Americans, which I thought a bit of a disapointment - didnt really give much history, for obvious reasons I guess, and the National Museum of American History, which was better - had the actual Star Spangled Banner and a really interesting section on Abraham Lincoln.

As for reading while away, I got through a couple of books. Amanda Petrusich's, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways and the Search for the Next American Music (2008), is a sort of travelogue in which the author visits many of the places associated with American country, folk and blues music - what these days is known as Americana. I really enjoyed it, had some excellent material on the Carter Family and Woody Guthrie in particular, and was wonderfully evocotive of many of those places which figured so heavily in American music, Memphis, Nashville, Appalacia, Greenwich Village. Then I've been reading Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (2007). Its a really irreverent and downright profane look at the white redneck underclass in America, 'the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in Starbucks'! Sure his case is overstated, but he does has some very powerful things to say about a certain slice of contemporary America, and makes some pertient comments on the often negative effect of American Fundamentalist Christianity.

I've another trip to the States pencilled in for January 2011 - this time its the American Society for Church History conference at Boston. I'm part of a panel to showcase a new publication, the Oxford History of the British Sermon, to which I'm contributing. I think I've said I'll give a paper on George Whitefield and his role in forming modern evangelical preaching.

Here's hoping I won't get detained by US Immigration for three hours again . . . . .

At last - a decent book about Johnny Cash!!

2010-06-30T20:49:00.000+01:00

At last I've found an intelligent and critical study of Johnny Cash and his music, after working my way through a fair bit of hagiography and blatant mythologising both by Cash himself and plenty of others. Leigh H. Edwards', Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), is different in that its written from a more academic perspective. Edwards is a real country music fan, and big-time Cash fan of course, but she's also a literary critic and applies a whole range of critical apparatus to Cash's work, she looks at issues relating to authenticity in Cash's persona, uses gender analysis, and even postcolonial theory in one chapter. Its not as bad as it sounds!!

The problem with Cash is that there was never a single Cash, he was a complex character who almost revelled in the multiple personae he adopted. Edwards call him a 'walking contradiction', at the same time a social protestor, establishment patriot, drugged wild man, devout Christian crusader, rebel outlaw hillbilly thug and then country music elder statesman. The different chapters in the book look at these contradictory personae in some detail. I won't comment on all of them here, just the one in which I'm most interested, Cash religious persona.

Edwards argues that the 'binaries of saint and sinner, sacred and profane' (p. 158), really runs through Cash's whole life, and that those dichotomies were never really resolved or integrated. In this she's different from many of the simple, and more one-dimensional lives of Cash which attempt to portray him as the redeemed drug addict who through the love of June Carter and a reconnection with his religious roots got his life back on track in the late 1960s. Its that kind of overly-simplified narrative which the Walk the Line film of a few years back runs with.

Edwards has a useful shortish analysis of the role of religion in Southern American culture. On the whole she tried to avoid reductionistic arguments. The traditional interpretation tend to be something along the lines of Evangelical Protestantism being regarded as the religion of the poor and dispossed in the South, and religious language giving the region a common cultural reference point. Edwards prefers to see the relationship between evangelicalism and country music as a little more complex. Evangelicalism's individualism and distrust of religious intermdiaries in favour of a personal and immediate relationship with God, chimes with certain aspects of the Southern mindset. Cash's stress on his own personal relationship with Jesus, and his distrust of religious institutions - he rarely attended church for any extended period of time - fits neatly with this interpretation.

Edwards discusses Cash's various conversion narratives in some detail, coming back to the point repeatedly that Cash's 'conversion' in the Nickajack Caves was never total - that he wasn't delivered from drug abuse like he has claimed in some of his accounts, although not in the most candid of his autobiographies, Cash (1997).

Cash's film about the life of Jesus, The Gospel Road (1973) is also similarly complex and mulit-layered. Cash's Jesus is very much one of his own making - one fighting for the underdog against the political and religious authorities of his day - something Cash thought he was doing through his Man in Black persona, and championing of the rights of Native Americans. In much the same way his novelistic life of the Apostle Paul, The Man in White (1986) presented an idiosyncratic apostle! Cash showed his admiration for the Paul who defied the religious authorities, changing from a persecutor of Christians to Christianity's most passionate advocate, who showed his dedication to Jesus, in spite of extreme suffering. For Cash too, Paul is highly individualistic, who refused to be hemmed in by his society and culture, 'preferring to define himself through his interaction with religion' (p. 180). Again, a Paul almost re-made in Cash's own image!

So Edwards' account of Cash is by far the most sophisticated out there. I'm wondering whether to try John Huss and David Werther's, Johnny Cash and Philosophy: The Burning Ring of Truth (2009) next. It sounds intriguing and is really a book of essays by a variety of philosophers on aspects of Cash's ideas. A quick look at the chapter titles point to esoteric themes like: 'Cash, Kant and the Kingdom of Ends' and 'Johnny Cash: Philosophy as a Way of Life', which sound fascinating, if only on account of their apparent wierdness. There a section in the book on Cash's religious ideas though, so I'll have to take a look.

Anyway, I'm trying to remember that this isn't meant to be a blog dedicated to Johnny Cash - at some point all the reading has to turn into some actual writing!

I'm gonna be a vicar!!!

2010-06-29T14:20:00.000+01:00

Well, its been a big couple of weeks just passed. I've just been accepted to train for ministry in the Church in Wales; its been a long process, the Church in Wales has a pretty demanding and rigorous selection process, and I've just come through the final stage - successfully!

Its a subject I've not blogged about here, but in a sense its formed the backdrop to all I've been doing for the past year or so. I should try and write in more depth about how a once staunch Welsh nonconformist got to the point of offering himself for Anglican ordination - maybe sometime I will!

The whole selection process has involved reading lots of books about the call to ministry and the Anglican church from a rich variety of traditions, and lots of protracted discussions with various people, friends, my local rector, and then the diocesan Director of Ordinands, the Bishop of St Davids and a series of interviews, six in all(!) at both diocesan and provincial level! Its been a deeply affirming experience throughout in so many ways.

Well the plan is to train for non-stipendiary ministry, basically voluntary and part time ministry. This will allow me to combine my current job with ministry. The basic plan is to do some part-time study for two years. I'd then be ordained and serve a curacy on a part-time basis for three years somewhere around Aberystwyth.

So its some study to begin with, through the Church in Wales college, St Michael's in Llandaff, Cardiff. My particular path of study will basically involve following a suite of modules, some through distance learning arrangements, others through some evening classes and residential weekends. I start with some practical theology in September!

For the next couple of months I've got a few more opportunities to lead services and preach in a number of small churches around Aberystwyth. I'm looking forward to this, getting more experience of leading and preaching in a variety of different kinds of Anglican churches. I'll blog about them in due course.

So exciting times ahead . . . .

Theology and country music - yes there is such a thing!!

2010-06-24T21:46:00.000+01:00

My exploration of some of the serious literature on the history and themes of country music is gathering pace. I came across David Fillingim's, Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology (Macon, GA, 2003), the other day and so quickly placed my order via trusty old amazon.co.uk!

In some ways its the book on country music that I've been looking for, but in others its a bit of a disappointment. The good points include it being about the whole history of country music, with a chapter on more recent developments including Garth Brooks. But too often it ends up straying from discussing the theology of country music and ends up talking in much more general terms about the music.

It starts with a really helpful chapter dealing with some of the methodology necessary for reading country music. This is very useful as is the guide to the main scholarly writing on the genre. The first chapter looks at the relationship between country music and gospel music, its nearest cousin really. In this chapter Fillingim sees the cheatin' songs so characteristic of country music as serving the same purpose as the questioning implicit in many gospel songs - both are songs that deal with questions of theodicy - the problem of evil and suffering. Gospel songs tend to reinforce the powerlessness of Southern whites with a culture of domesticity, cheating songs tend to enable them to protest against their powerlessness much more effectively.

In a chapter on Hank Williams, Fillingim looks at the dark side of country music, but the chapter quickly morphs into a discussion of Hank's more recent counterpart George Jones. The chapter is particularly good on the sense of irony in country music, the contrast between the way things are and the way things ought to be! Yet there wasn't much theology in this chapter. More interesting, if only because its dealing with more recent material is the chapter on Garth Brooks, but according to Fillingim the claim to theological content in his music rests on the apocalyptic elements in some of his songs - song like 'The River' or more obviously, 'We shall be Free'. Like most commentary on Garth Brooks' music though this discussion centred largely on whether his music is actually country music at all!

There's a better final chapter on women and country music, but again its reads a bit like a run through of some of the main highlights in the history of female country music, via Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, of course, Dolly Parton and Shania Twain, and then a mix of various slightly younger women singers, Emmylou Harris, Trisha Yearwood, and the the Dixie Chicks - a slight odd mix really. In a short conclusion, Fillingim rounds off with a short discussion of some of the main 'theological' themes in country music: dignity, fate, responsibility, simplicity, love, hope. I don't know if it was just me, but some of these themes were/are only theological in the most general of ways really.

So quite an interesting read, if a little infuriating and actually quite poor on the theological analysis. The book has the virtue of a really good bibliography though, which has given me a lots of leads for further reading. So watch this space . . . . .

Writing about Calvin's legacy in Wales

2010-06-11T00:00:00.047+01:00

Well, with all the exam and marking responsibilities done and dusted for another academic year, its back to the full-time research and writing for the summer. It feels like a lovely long stretch ahead at the minute, but with a trip to the US and some holiday time too, it'll go quickly enough and it'll be September before I blink, and then the students will be back . . .

First up is a chapter for a book which explores some of the ways in which Christians during the nineteenth century appealed to and made use of the sixteenth-century Reformation. I'm trying to write about some of the intra-Calvinist debates that engulfed much of Welsh nonconformity in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as different variants of Reformed orthodoxy each tried to lay claim to be the genuine heirs of John Calvin. At the minute I'm exploring the influence of John Elias, the Calvinistic Methodist leader, who attempted to stem the flow away from stricter more traditional interpretations of Calvinism. I'm trying to read some of his correspondence, some of which has appeared in print in the past, and some of which is still available in manuscript form in the National Library of Wales. The problem is that much of it is infuriatingly vague and barely discusses theological matters! But I also want to try and do a little more with the article and place Elias and the Welsh Calvinist debates in a slightly wider context too, certainly an American, if not also an European context, seeing as similar debates were occurring in many other countries also at the same time.

To this end I've just been reading a new book of essays on Calvin's influence in the United States. Thomas J. Davis (ed.), John Calvin's American Legacy (New York: OUP, 2010). The book seems to have come out of the Calvin conference in Geneva that I attended last year. There are some excellent chapters in it. Davis' introduction is very useful and unravels some of the many Calvin myths that are out there in the popular imagination. I've been reading Douglas Sweeney's chapter very closely; he looks at the contest over Calvinism in nineteenth century America, as the Princetonian defenders of 'traditional' Calvinism took on newer expressions of Reformed theology in the shape of the Mercerberg theology and the New Haven theology. Its a really useful article as some of the same ideas were circulating in Wales; the trans-Atlantic dimension in Welsh nonconformity has been overlooked, largely because it has been assumed that the Welsh language insulted many in Wales from external theological influences. That was far from being the case. So I'm hoping to explore some of these issues in a bit of depth in this article, but its early stages yet!

There's lots of other good material in the book too, include some chapters that deal with more contemporary expression of Calvinism in America. Davis himself also appears to be quite taken with Marilynne Robinson, and offers a useful, if far too short, reflection on her interpretation of Calvinism and its American legacy that figures so prominently in her two novels, Gilead (2004) and Home (2008).

I also thought it was time that the blog received a little bit of a revamp. Blogger have just launched a new range of more interesting templates, so its goodbye to the tulips for a little while at least . . . .

Pottering about in the country of country music

2010-06-02T10:11:00.000+01:00

I've been reading this book on the history of country music during the past week or so, branching out a little bit from all the Johnny Cash stuff! Its much more than a history book this though, Nicholas Dawidoff travels to meet many of the people and places that have figured in the story of country music, with a couple of notable exceptions of course! This makes for a really lively account, the book is jam-packed with stories about many of the larger-than-life characters he writes about. Dawidoff's choice of artists is not always obvious mind - Hank Williams flits in and out of the book, rather than being dealt with in his own right, and there's very little here about contemporary Nashville country music, much of it dismissed as little better than pop music really. Contemporary country is limited to a discussion of Emmylou Harris, Iris Dement and Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Austin music scene - all great, and probably more interesting, but maybe not representative of where commercial country music is at right now.

Anyway, he starts right at the beginning with the Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers, the pioneers of modern country music; the real story of the Carter Family being slightly more disfunctional than the wholesome images of the gospel-singing family trio that's often assumed. While Sara and Anita were the main voices, A. P. Carter was the genius behind the trio really, with his wunderlust periodic wanderings in the Appalacian hills retrieving old American folk songs (and sawmills?!!!) and then repackaging them for his own group. The main recordings were made in the 1920s and '30s, but have been wonderfully remastered; the sound is still a little scratchy, but wonderfully evocative. Many of them have become better known through Johnny Cash, of course! I've tried listening to Jimmie Rogers, who had a very brief recording career during the 1920s, but I can't get past the yodelling!

I was also fascinated by the chapter on The Louvin Brothers. Charlie and Ira Louvin's high harmony singing was massive in the 1950s - Elvis was actually one of their opening acts for a while! In many ways Ira Louvin exemplifies many of the complexities at the heart of country music. Like so many country singers their music is soaked in the Southern evangelical sub-culture, yet Ira was a chronic alcoholic and drove himself to an early grave, at the height of his creative powers really, as a consequence. The same story and conflict might be told over and over! Johnny Cash appears in one chapter, and the author gets fairly close access to Cash, even welcommed into his home. But his opinion of Cash is pretty damning really, basically saying that he never bettered his early Sun Records recordings, and that his American Recordings series betray an alarming inability on Cash's part to write anything new of a similar quality - a bit harsh really, but then only two of these albums had appeared when this book was published.

One of the drawbacks reading a book like this though is that my amazon account takes a bit of a battering! His chapter on Buck Owens has got me interested in the Bakersfield country sound - a harder edged music that Owens perfected in Honky Tonks in California, but that's been taken to a even higher level really by Dwight Yoakam in more recent times. I cant believe I've never discovered Merle Haggard either, so I'm going to have to invest in some of his music too! Haggard was a small time crook who ended up in San Quentin Prison, and was inspired to follow his own musical career after attending some of Johnny Cash's prison concerts in the late '60s and early '70s. He went on to have more country No. 1s than any other artist. In Dawidoff's book Hag features side by side with Iris Dement, as she's visiting his Californian studio to help him record some of her songs. I discovered Dement about fifteen years ago when her first album, Infamous Angel, was released. Dement has an almost unique voice, that harks back to a much earlier country sound, more in tune with the original Carter family than anything else. But its her songs about her rural Southern upbringing, and particularly about the faith of her Mother that standout most.

Well, Dawidoff's book is a terrific tour of country music both geogrpahically and historically. Its inspired me to try listening to some new voices too! Time to give the amazon account another hammering!!

When Socialism replaces the Gospel - a new biography of Donald Soper

2010-05-29T20:41:00.000+01:00

I finished reading Mark Peel's, The Last Wesleyan: a Life of Donald Soper (Lancaster: Scotforth Books, 2008), a couple of weeks ago, at the height of the General Election campaign as it so happened. Devotees of the Labour Party of old, like Soper and his many contemporaries, would surely have been dismayed at the lack of principled debate in the 2010 campaign, but that's besides the point for the moment!

Soper was most well-known for his seventy year career preaching in the open air at Tower Hill and Hyde Park in London. The evocative picture on the cover of Peel's biography reflects that lifelong committment. For the majority of his working life Soper was also Superintendent of the West London Mission, the outreach agency that had been originally established by the eminent London-Welsh Wesleyan minister, and champion of the social gospel, Hugh Price Hughes. A lifelong advocate of Christian Socialism, Pacifism and a very liberal interpretation of the Christian message indeed, Soper was a controversial and polarising figure throughout the course of his life. Peel has written a terrific biography, that sets Soper in his context very effectively, and also gives a decent amount of space to his intellectual, theological and political development in addition to the more public facets of his life.

In a sense going over those aspects of Soper's liberal theology that seem most heterodox is a little pointless here. He himself disagreed sharply and publically with evangelicals throughout his life; Billy Graham arosed his ire during the Graham's crusades in 1950s London and some of his clashes with the fundamentist, Ian Paisley are legendary. But what can evangelical readers take from Soper's life?

Well, I can't help but observe that at a time when a Tory-led government (albeit one propped up by the Liberal Democrats) is back in power in Britain, and so many Christians seem to be positively rejoicing, Soper's lifelong commitment to the poor and dispossed, is a timely reminder that Christian's have a responsibility for social justice. Some evangelicals are far too content to make-do with a false pietism that so stresses the atoning nature of the Gospel, that they overlook its rootedness and worldliness. The gospel have a very powerful social dimension - Jesus talked quite a lot, more than many might like to admit, about poverty after all!

Again Soper's lifelong committment to the peace movement is a necessary corrective to many evangelical Christians, particulary on the other side of the Atlantic perhaps, who seem to be far to ready to use crusading military force to solve international disputes. Jesus said 'Blessed are the peacemakers' - he wasn't only referring to that peace which the gospel brings between God and man!

Yet having said all this I really couldn't help but feel that Soper, with his liberal committments, and over-concentration, maybe even conflation (perhaps that's too harsh a term) of Socialism and the Pacifism as almost being of the essence of the Gospel, ultimately had the effect of further weakening, or at least confusing, the cause of Christ in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. Evangelicals who wish to unify the preaching of the gospel and give meaningful expression to the social implications of the gospel have much that's good to learn from Soper - but there are perhaps one or two warnings sprinkled there as well.

Road trip to hear Dallas Williard

2010-05-21T13:53:00.000+01:00

Got up before the crack of dawn yesterday morning for a road trip with my friend Alwyn to Swindon to hear Dallas Willard, at a conference organised by the Bible Society. The theme of the conference was Knowing Christ Today: 'personal religion or public reality?', reflecting the title of Dallas' most recent book, Personal Religion, Public Reality: Towards a Knowledge of Faith (2009), which I blogged about a few months ago.

He spoke three times, for an hour on each occasion, and the sessions were interspersed with some Q&A sessions and worship. I'll summarise each of the sessions here, although each was so densely packed and rich in content that its difficult to do them justice.

The first session, I thought the best of the three, was most obviously drawn from his latest book. He started by talking about the ways in which Christian knowledge is debarred from the public sphere in much of the West today. Christianity is based on faith, which is irrational - a leap in the dark - we are told! Dallas, by contrast, argued that faith and knowledge are not oppossed: 'Leaps of faith are really leaps without faith. Faith has to be environed in knowledge'. Again: 'faith is an act of the will according to knowledge'. Much of the world today rejects God with what Dallas called a 'learned contempt', or a 'contempt without investigation'. Religion has been pushed out of the sphere of knowlege into the sphere of faith, thereby making it private and of no public worth. Putting Christians into the realm of faith, Dallas argued, actually disenfranchises us.

Dallas also contrasted much modern evangelical evangelism, with its stress on getting people to make a decision for Christ, with the approach that persisted in previous generations. 'Our task as preachers', he said, 'is not to get people to profess, but to give knowledge'.

He made some very perceptive comments about universities in one of the Q&A sessions too. Somebody asked about how we ensure that head knowledge becomes heart knowledge; how do we make sure that intellect and behaviour are connected? Universities, he said, deal with knowledge, but have nothing to say about character, that's why you dont learn about moral knowledge in university - much that goes by the name of knowledge is knowledge that simply doesn't carry through.

The afternoon sessions dealt with material that would be more familiar to anyone who'd read any of Dallas' books. In the earlier session he dealt with how with think about Jesus, who has also been relocated outside of knowledge. In the afternoon session Dallas used far more explicitly biblical exposition as he opened up themes relating to the kingdom of God and life within it. His thoughts on John 8: 31-2, Jesus' words about the truth setting us free, were especially powerful. He paraphrased the verse like this: 'if your my apprentices and know the truth, the truth will set you free'!

The final session was focussed more closely on spiritual formation. Discipleship, according to Dallas, was a status, spiritual formation is what happens to you as a disciple. The strap-line of the session was: how do I live my life as Jesus would if he lived my life?

It was an excellent day with lots to mull over and think through. I'd encourage anyone to real some of Dallas Willard's books. The best place to start is probably his The Divine Conspiracy: Recovering our Hidden Life in God (1998).

Yet more Johnny Cash!

2010-04-14T20:02:00.000+01:00

I came across another Johnny Cash biography the other day, and read it while on holiday's last week. In my previous Cash blogpost, I mentioned that the two biographies of Cash that I'd read were really weak on the spiritual dimension of his life, especially on the experiences that saw him delivered from drug addiction at the end of the 1960s. Well, this new study, Dave Urbanski, The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash (2003), claims to focus specifically on Cash's religious life - so I was hoping it would fill in some of the gaps left by the other two biographies.

Well, it turned out to be a pretty disappointing read in the end. There's hardly anything new here, and no real depth of analysis, despite the copious amount of material that Cash himself wrote about his relationship with God. Its actually a pretty poorly conceived and badly written book, and its hard to imagine what particular market the author and publishers had in mind for it. The only positive feature of it was the more in-depth look at the first four of Cash's albums for the American Recordings label. Here, Urbanski at least comments on the songs and tries to reflect upon their significance in the light of Cash life work.

All of which leads me to think that I really do need to re-read Rodney Clapp's, Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation (2008), but I'm also beginning to wonder whether there might be scope for a book on Cash and his music which tries to examine him within the context of Southern US evangelicalism. That would need someone who was not only an expert on Cash, but also someone familiar with the landscape of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism.

A research trip to the House of Cash outside Nashville is beginning to sound quite tempting . . . . . . . !

My Bob Dylan phase

2010-04-03T19:13:00.002+01:00

My blog has become a bit formal over the past few months; I've only really had time to post relatively polished book reviews, but I orignally wanted the blog to have a slightly looser feel, with shorter more impressionistic bits and pieces sitting along the longer reviews . . . I'll see what I can do!

Anyway, I'm going through a bit of a Bob Dylan phase at the minute. I've been reading the first instalment of his autobiography: Bob Dylan: Chronicles, Volume One (2004), and buying some of his very early albums, the ones from the early '60s. The autobiography is a bit of a quirky read, jumps around all over the place, and actually tells you very little about the narratival flow of Dylan's actual life, its as enigmatic as you'd expect from him I suppose!

Its broken up into five largish sections; the first two concentrate on his early career, struggling to make it as a folk singer in Greenwich Village in New York, befriending a dying Woody Guthrie, singing his songs and trying to find an authentic voice. The middle two sections then focus on the recording of two of Dylan's albums: New Morning, a country(ish) album that saw Dylan come back to something like his best form in 1994 and Oh Mercy, his 2004 outing recorded in New Orleans. The last chapter goes right back to Dylan's childhood in 1950s Minnesota, and charts, among other things, his discovery of music and songwriting and some of his earliest friends in the American folk music community.

As I said above its a bit of an eccentric, even eclectic read, certainly not a typical autobiography, but it does evoke aspects of the ealry '60s American counterculture quite well, and particuarly Dylan's somewhat ambivalent attitude to his status as a spokesman for radical political ideas. I've been listening to Dylan's first album while reading this, its a very different sounding Dylan than the more familiar voice from the mid-'60s. Here a twenty-year old Dylan, in an album that sold atrociously when it first came out, sings a host of covers, mainly of older folk and country songs, with a few of his own self-penned items very much in the same vein as the songs of his mentor Woody Guthrie. Its fascinating listenning really, a bit like the early Sun Records recordings made by Johnny Cash or Elvis Presley really. For me the two standout tracks are: 'Baby, Let me Follow you Down' and: 'See that my Grave is Kept Clean'!

Just got to expand the CD collection now with the rest of the '60s albums. Why doesn't Aber have a better record shop?!!!

Christianity - a resurrection religion!

2010-03-29T10:53:00.000+01:00

In Raised with Christ: How the Resurrection Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010), Adrian Warnock argues that the majority of evangelical Christians tend to overlook the importance of the resurrection, actually paying much more attention to the death of Jesus than his literal physical rising again three days later. In an at times passionate book, Warnock attempts to redress this imbalance.

Raised with Christ is not an academic tome on the resurrection, for that N. T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) remains unsurpassed, and is likely to do so for a very long time! Warnock's book is aimed at the wider Christian community and aims to show the pervasiveness of the resurrection throughout the New Testament and the relevance of the resurrection in the life of the Christian today.

The book's opening sections elaborate on Warnock's chief contention that the resurrection is neglected among contemporary evangelicals. There is then some more familiar material on the evidences for the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus, before the rest of the book concentrates on the present implications of the resurrection. These include some excellent material on the place of resurrection is confirming our justification. One senses that Warnock is most comfortable in the more practical applicatory sections of the book. He's good on the transformative power of the resurrection, but I did get the impression that the actual focus of the book became a little blurred somewhere around chapters 12 through to 16. Here Warnock has some excellent material on the minstry of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian, there's nothing wrong with it whatsoever, but its link to the resurrection is tangential, aside from the obvious point that the risen Christ sends the Holy Spirit! There lots of good material in these chapters, especially on experiencing the risen Christ in our own lives and experience, but quite a lot of this section read like a defence of the Baptism of the Spirit, along the lines of Martyn Lloyd-Jones than anything else.

The book is rounded off with a terrific description of the way in which Jesus' resurrection is an intimation of our own final resurrection - the eschatalogical significance of the resurrection in other words. Maybe this seciton might actually have been expanded somewhat?

Warnock's main influences are clear on most pages of the book: Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones and John Piper are his most frequently cited authors, but there's a liberal sprinkling of Jonathan Edwards too!

This is an excellent read, warmly recommended for close study over the Easter period.

Thinking about the 'Man in Black'

2010-03-21T15:37:00.002Z

For those who don't know the 'Man in Black' refers to Johnny Cash, the American singer, to call him a country singer is too restrictive, who died in 2003. The release of the sixth, and surely final, album by American Recordings: CASH: Ain't No Grave (2010), earlier this month, consisting of 10 songs recorded by him in the last weeks of his life, has got me back into listening to Cash's work and reading some of the many biographies that have appeared about him in the last decade or so.

Cash's recording career went through a number of phases, most of his best-known songs, 'I Walk the Line', 'Ring of Fire' etc, were first recorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during his days under the guidance of Sam Phillips and Sun Records in Memphis, the same stable that also produced Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins at roughly the same time. Increased addiction to amphetamines throughout the '60s, led to a reduction in his creative talents until, following a profound religious experience after a sort-of suicide attempt in the Nickajack caves, led to a new focus and his famous prison concerts at Folsom and the notorious San Quentin in California. The 1970s and '80s were not the best decades as Cash, by this stage increasingly overlooked by the Nashville establishment, struggled to get much radio airplay in the US. His rehabilitation came in the early 1990s at the hands of the unlikely rap producer Rick Rubin. Under his guidance, Rubin produced six albums which saw Cash return to a stripped back sound, much as he had done at the beginning of his career. The first album, American Recordings, featuring just Cash and his gorgeous Martin acoustic guitar, was a collection of traditional country songs and sprinkled with a few Cash originals. It led to a further three albums during Cash's lifetime, all of which followed the same pattern, stripped back production, showcasing Cash's voice, and a collection of traditional folk and country songs by the likes of Jimmie Rogers and the Carter Family, some fresh material from Cash himself and more controversially some covers of more pop and rock material from the likes of Tom Petty, Neil Diamond, Depeche Mode, U2 and most famously, a version of the Nine Inch Nails song 'Hurt', in which an obviously dying Cash sung about his battle with addiction and the havoc it had wreaked in his life. Two further albums were released after Cash's death, both featuring an obviously weakened Cash, singing material recorded in the months following the death of his wife June Carter and before his own death shortly after. For those who've not heard Cash, the first American Recordings album, called just American Recordings, is probably the best - indeed its been hailed at the best album of Cash's career. It contains all the Cash themes, death, murder, redemption and love! The first track, 'Delia's Gone', about a guy tying his girlfriend to a chair before shooting her is typical, as is the song which follows shortly after - 'Why Me, Lord?' - the juxtaposition of a slightly malevolent streak and profound spiritual insight, summing up the contradictions in Cash's own character.

Cash published two autobiographies; the first in the late 1970s wasn't great. A much better version, Cash: The Autobiography, was published in 1997. These kind of autobiographies are often a bit hit and miss, but Cash's stands out for its honesty and integrity. There's lots on his dirt poor upbringing on a cotton farm in Dyess, Arkansas, the tragic early death of his brother Jack in his early teens, the early days at Sun Records, the writing of the famous songs, then the gradual deterioration into drug dependancy, the ridiculous behaviour on the road where guns and over-the-top practical jokes, some of which are actually hilarious, seem to have been the norm, and then the spiritual awakening after his suicide attempt in the late 1960s. The candour with which Cash speaks about all these problems is the key attraction of the book; yes, his discussion of other singers and celebrities can be a bit cloying at times, and there are lots of questions that the book doesn't answer - unsurprising really given that this is a deeply personal narrative on Cash's part. There's lots o nhis Christian life too, his conversion at an Arkansas Baptist Church at the age of 12, his spiralling out of control as his popularity increased, and then his regeneration and new marriage to June Carter, who seems to have kept him broadly together for the remainder of his life, although there were a number of further sad, but thankfully short, relapses into drug dependency.

So curiosity led me into looking what else was out there about Cash. I came across Stephen Miller's Johnny Cash: The Life of an American Icon (2003), which at a little over 400 very closely written pages is a much more thorough look at Cash's life and career. Yet I thought it was a really irritating book. It didn't tell me an awful lot more about Cash himself, apart from the addition of some more outlandish stories, most of which didn't really add to the general sum of Cash knowledge. The most infuriating part of this book though was Miller's less than positive opinion about most of Cash's music - most of his albums, not just the cheesier side of his output, and including the critically acclaimed American Recordings series, come in for pretty hefty criticism in places. His recordings with Bob Dylan, especially their recording of 'A Girl from the North Country' being especially singled out. There's also a really cynical attitude here to Cash's spiritual life. It certainly figures heavily in the book, but Miller has little understanding, leave alone sympathy, for the southern US evangelical subculture. There are plenty of books that concentrate on Cash's spiritual life in more detail, but many of these are written by insiders of that evangelical culture; I've resisted buying and reading any of them yet - their hagiographical tone is likely just as unhelpful as Miller's more cynical approach.

I haven't mentioned Rodney Clapp's, Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of the Nation (2008), which I read a couple of years ago and probably could now do with revisiting. Now to the guitar to get that opening riff from 'Folsom Prison Blues' right!!

Tom Wright's new book!

2010-03-01T20:45:00.001Z

I don't often review a book before I've actually finished reading it, but I'm in the middle of Tom Wright's new book, Virtue Reborn (SPCK, 2010), and thought I'd offer a shortish recommendation now - before maybe writing a slightly longer review when I actually finish it!

The book basically asks the question: How should I live as a Christian? Wright argues throughout that Christian living is all about the development of character, or to use the phrase from the title of the book, 'virtue'. He charts a course between the two usual options given newly converted Christians; either keep this list of rules and you will please God and live a proper Christian life, or God loves you and accepts you just as you are, so just be true to yourself and live authentically. Both options he says are wrong and doomed to discouragement and ultimately to failure. Living a successful Christian life is all about transformation, the transformation of character, achieved through training in righteousness.

Wright is at his best, as always, when he paints in the big picture of what God's redemption in Jesus Christ is all about. Here Wright picks up on the themes of what is really the companion volume to this book, Surprised by Hope (2007), by showing how the goal of salvation is the renewal of the whole of God's creation, something begun in the resurrection of Jesus. Christians are called to live in anticipation of this future hope, when God will put all things to rights. So the development of Christian character becomes all about reflecting God's image back into the world. One quote as a taster:

'thinking of Christian behaviour in terms of virtue, and reframing virtue in terms of the promised new heaven and new earth and the role of humans within it, provides both a framework of meaning for, and a strong impetus towards the path of, the holiness to which Jesus and his first followers would call us' (p. 62).

Well, I'm only on chapter 3 - hope that's enough to whet your appetities for now!

A new biography of David Brainerd

2010-02-18T20:44:00.000Z

David Brainerd (1718-47) is one of those names that figures heavily in evangelical folklore; his story being told and retold, both for adults and children, in the centuries since his death in the middle of the eighteenth century. In these versions of his life he invariably appears as one of those idealised heroic missionaries, mentioned almost in the same breath as David Livingstone and William Carey, on account of his success in taking the gospel to some tribes of Native American Indians in Delaware. I first read his life story, in the form of Jonathan Edwards' edition of his journals during my first year at university, and can remember being captivated not only by the names of the Indian tribes that he worked among, but his example of godly self-sacrifical ministry. So it was with some anticipation that I started reading John A. Grigg's new biography; The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Grigg's biography does an admirable job in getting past many of the myths that have grown up around Brainerd's life and ministry. Through complete absorption in the widely scattered primary sources, Grigg has probably reconstructed the most thoroughly contextualised, realistic and nuanced life of his subject to date. The picture that emerges from Grigg's narrative is neither that of the tortured missionary nor the plaster saint. Brainerd was from a very well-connected Connecticuit family, and so the sense of shame that haunted him following his expulsion from Yale in 1742, at the height of the excitement that accompanied the Great Awakening, for questioning the reality of the faith of some of its faculty, cast a fairly long shadow over his short life. Grigg deals with this aspect of his life in some detail, particuarly Brainerd's efforts to distance himself from his somewhat rash judgements. In a sense though this was merely a further manifestation of the divisions that the Great Awakening opened up within colonial New England, as itinerant evangelists became divisive figures in many communities. Brainerd himself was not immune from these problems, flirting at times with the more ecstatic side of the revival, and arousing suspicion becuase of his experiences at Yale. Grigg discusses Brainerd's ministry to the Native Americans at length, of course, but again the Brainerd that emerges is much more enlightened in his attitudes to the Indians than many of his contemporaries. Brainerd was sensitive to the culture of the Indians whom he worked with, willing to abandon much of his own cultural baggage to reach them for Christ. His early death at the age of just 32 in only added to the mystique that had already begun to surround him.

However, Grigg's biography of Brainerd makes up only half of his narrative, the second half of his book looks at how Brainerd's memory was used subsequently by evangelicals. In many ways I found this the most fascinating part of the book. Evangelicals have been champions at making saints out of their leaders, and Brainerd has not escaped beatification! Beginning with Jonathan Edwards' Life of Brainerd (1749), constructed largely from his own diaries, Brainerd's life has been written and re-written to meet the needs of various types of evangelicals. Edwards, whose Life, has been the most influential account, portrayed Brainerd as a model of the 'right way of practicing religion' (p. 163), while John Wesley's Extract of the Life of David Brainerd (1768), shorn of any references to Calvinism, went through multiple editions immediately following its appearence, portrayed Brainerd as an example to his own itinerant preachers. In the nineteenth century, Brainerd became the prototypical missionary, looked up to by both William Carey and Henry Martyn. Later in Antebellum America, another Brainerd was invented, this time the self-sacrifical missionary, an 'example of self denial, or patience under privations and sufferings' (p. 172). Later as the number of American Protestant missionary agencies mushroomed in the 1880s, in the hands of Moody and A. T. Pierson, so Brainerd was again reinvented as the man of prayer, who's example would inspire many others to take up the missionary call and complete the evangelisation of the worlld in that generation! Finally, and maybe most remarkably, in the late twentieth century, Brainerd the proto-civil rights activist was born!!

Grigg's book while an excellent study of Brainerd's life, now the definitive study without a doubt, also raises some very important issues about evangelical identity and re-invention. Contemporary evangelicalism is awash with hagiographical accounts of past luminaries, and plenty of writers intent on writing biographies that bolster their reputation; my own work on George Whitefield has shown the continuing persistence of that approach. Grigg's biography is a wonderful example of how to write a sympathetic, but critically informed life. As good, I would suggest, as George Marsden's, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003), a book I still think is the best example of how one evangelical should write the biography of another evangelical.

But in the case of Brainerd, maybe there was something remarkable about the depth of his personal sanctity, although I wouldn't want to go as far as two American missionaries who, while thinking about who they would want to welcome them at the gates of Heaven, chose Brainerd, bypassing Peter, Paul and all of the Old Testament patriarchs!!

What God hath Wrought!

2010-01-21T20:11:00.001Z

I picked up a copy of Daniel Walker Howe's, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007), the other day. Its the latest volume in the Oxford History of the United States, and at an impressive 900 pages covers the period between the end of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and the American victory in Mexico, the age of expansion, innovation and improvement associated with the name of President Andrew Jackson, of course. Its one of those encyclopaedic books packed full of intriguing vignettes about people and events you previously knew little about.

I bought it up largely because religious developments figure prominently in Howe's narrative. This was the era of course of what's become known as the Second Great Awakening. Howe takes a very broad brushed approach; obviously Charles Finney figures prominently in his interpretation, but his Finney is not the wild-eyed enthusiast that some of his more Reformed evangelical biographers have tended to portray. Howe's Finney is the theologically sophisticated, urbane and enlightened anti-slavery campaigner. For widespread influence, personal integrity, social conscience, and spiritual power, few American evangelists of a later age could equal Charles G. Finney' (pp. 175-6). Howe then casts the net much wider, and sees the Second Great Awakening, unleashing tremendous spiritual energy, the result of which was not only revivalism among the more mainstream denominations, but the upsurge of pseudo-Christian groups with finely tuned millenial expectations, not least of which were the Mormons. There's nothing in Howe's interpretation that's not also in Nathan Hatch's, The Democratization of Christianity (1989), but for the sheer sweep of its narrative, Howe's book is hard to beat.

I freely admit to not having ploughed my way all the 900 pages of Howe's book - it would certianly repay that kind of reading, but its an equally good book in which to dip in and out of at those points of greatest interest. Warmly recommended!

What Would Jesus Do?

2010-01-13T16:47:00.006Z

All Christians are meant to be followers of Jesus - right? Well Ed Dobson, an evangelical pastor from Grand Rapids in the United States, set himself the task of living like Jesus for a whole year. His The Year of Living Like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really Do (Zondervan, 2009), is the account of his lifestyle change.

Dobson's book is merely the latest in a growing genre of these journey-style books which attempt to get under the skin of various religious communities and lifestyles. A. J. Jacob's, The Year of Living Biblically (2007) was the first of these; readers of this blog will have seen my thoughts on Kevin Rouse's undercover story of a semester at Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Liberty University in Virginia. Dobson's book is different from these since its not intended to be satirical or an expose of any kind, but rather the radical experiment of a Christian pastor as he tries to live in the twenty-first century as Jesus would have lived in the first.

The book is arranged in journal form, with twelve chapters charting Dobson's year-long experiment. What adds extra poignancy to the book is the fact that Dobson also has the degenerative motor-neurone disease, and so his attempts to live like Jesus are interwoven with the realisation that his physically capabilities are decreasing quite quickly, and that the remainder of his life can be counted in months and years rather than decades. At the outset though I should say that this is not as incisive or, for that matter, as entertaining a read as the books by Jacob's and Rouse already mentioned. I didnt laugh out loud once, as I did with those two books!!

So what did I make of it?

Well I was struck first of all by the shallowness of much that goes by the name of American evangelicalism. A very basic understanding of the conversion experience, little more than saying the sinner's prayer, a list of behavioural expectations in which not drinking any alcohol figures very highly, being vehemently pro-life, and a strong committment to Republican politics seems to be about it! Isnt this more fundamentalist than evangelical though?

Then I didn't think that Dobson had really decided what it was he was trying to do. Was he trying to live as Jesus lived or live as Jesus said? In some places he was trying to live in the same way as Jesus, so much of the book is taken up with Dobson trying to live as an orthodox Jew. There's comparatively little in the book about following Jesus' teachings, living the Sermon on the Mount, for example.

Dobson does try and experience other religious traditions, thankfully, but its all a bit random really. There's an attempt to engage with Roman Catholicism throughout, but this never really get beyond praying the Rosary over and over again. Simialrly with elements of Eastern Orthodoxy. There's not an attempt to engage with the long standing literature and ideas about living like Jesus, both Protestant and Catholic, not even Aquinas' Imitatio Christi. Even within contemporary evangelicalism there are writers attempting to explain what it means to live as Jesus said. I wish Dobson had read Dallas Williard or Richard Foster.

But there plenty of humourous moments too; working out what food is kosher and what not in such a way as not to offend his hosts at various dinner parties, his solitary retreat to the mountains around Grand Rapids which lasts only a few hours, the guilty feeling he gets as he sits in a bar drinking a beer, and the angst over voting for Barack Obama!

One final observation: is there any significance in the fact that this book and Kevin Rouse's expose of Liberty University are recommended by Rob Bell and Brian McLaren? Surely that's not a coincidence . . .

Calvinism sure turns up in some strange places!

2010-01-07T09:19:00.003Z

Richard Mouw, of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, has gained a reputation of late for some insightful and reflective books on his own lifetime spent within the American evangelical world. His The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals can Learn from their Fundamentalist Heritage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000) is a critical, yet often poignant and personal look at some of the good things that contemporary evangelicals would do well to learn from their Fundamentalist predecessors. But Mouw is also a Calvinist, and has written a similarly personal reflection on what’s good and what’s not so good about Calvinism, particularly in its present day incarnations. His Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004) was sparked by a scene from a film (called Hardcore!!) in which a Calvinist, sitting in the Las Vegas airport, strikes up a conversation with a young woman who is helping him search for his daughter who’s got involved in the pornography industry. The conversation turns to matters religious, and Jake Van Dorn ends up telling the young woman, in fairly blunt and unadorned terms, about TULIP and the Five Points of Calvinism. Mouw is struck by the incongruity of the scene – why did he just tell her about Jesus? - and sets off on his own journey to discover what it is that can make Calvinists so harsh and seemingly culturally detached. The book is not therefore an examination of Calvinist beliefs, as it is about what Calvinists do with those beliefs. The book has an excellent summary of basic Calvinist distinctives, but it also a timely warning shot for many contemporary Calvinists for whom defending Calvinism is everything, but engaging with real people can seem to be much less of a pressing concern. There are some terrific quotations and vignettes in the book. I loved the one about Jonathan Edwards’ complaint in the middle of the eighteenth century that the term Calvinism had become a matter ‘of reproach’. Mouw writes: ‘he didn’t know how good he had it in comparison to what would happen in later centuries’ (p. 126). R. B. Kuiper’s claim that ‘Calvinism is the most nearly perfect interpretation of Christianty. In the final analysis Calvinism and Christianity are practically synonymous’ (p. 118) is, I guess, typical of the kind of exaggerated claims of many Calvinists! I loved his returning again and again, though, to the opening question of the Heidleberg Catechism too:

Q: What is thy only comfort in life and death? A: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and make me sincerely willingly and ready, henceforth to live unto him. Mouw’s concern about the way in which Jake Van Dorn responded to the woman’s spiritual questions with a lecture about TULIP, does raise some important questions about some of the weaknesses of Calvinism though. How many stories have you heard about reformed Christians going out armed to evangelise with their heads crammed full of Calvinist rhetoric, and sounding more like they’ve swallowed a theological textbook, than learned how to become winsome spokespersons for Jesus and his gospel? Its the weakness of so much modern Calvinism, at least in Britain, that its proponents would feel more at home in sixteenth-century Geneva, or seventeenth-century New England, British Calvinism is so rarely properly and thoroughly enculturated. It did strike me, though, that this book is ever so slightly dated, even though it was only written in 2004! Since then there has been a resurgence of Calvinism in some parts of America, associated with individuals like John Piper, Mark Driscoll and C. J. Mahaney. But this is a very different kind of Calvinism from that which Mouw describes in his book, witness some of the reviews of Colin Hansen’s Young, Restless and Reformed (Crossway Books, 2007) that have emanated from some of the old Calvinist establishments to see how threatened some Calvinists are by the ‘success’ of these other newer looking Calvinists. This New Calvinism is self-consciously ‘missional’. People like Mark Driscoll are attempting to present traditional Calvinistic theology in twenty-first century dress, and the palpable hunger for it seems to suggest that he, and others, are enjoying remarkable success. Maybe some of Mouw’s worries about the poor image of Calvinism and Calvinists are being put to rest even as I write!

Some Christmas reading

2010-01-05T09:19:00.003Z

Over Christmas I’ve been really enjoying Keith Robbins’ new history of Christianity in twentieth-century Britain; England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church, 1900‑2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Part of the illustrious ‘Oxford History of the Christian Church’ series, at just over 500 pages its not short, and Robbins’ has a slightly prolix writing style that takes time to adjust to, but its well worth the effort. There’s been a glut of other similar books in the last decade or so, assessing and analysing the shape and decline of Christianity in Britain during the course of the last century. Adrian Hastings’, A History of English Christianity, 1920-2000 (2001) and Callum Brown’s, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (2006) are both indispensible accounts, but in my opinion Robbins’ survey is a richer and more ambitious account. Its main virtue is its attempt to do justice to developments in each of the four constituent parts of the British Isles, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Robbins’ attempts to write in a genuine four-nations way, borrowing heavily from the New British History perspective, indeed this is one of the best examples of that approach to the study of any aspect of British history that I’ve come across to date. This is no account of English Christianity, with bits and pieces on Ireland, Scotland and Wales thrown in for good measure, let alone an example of the: ‘For Wales, see England’ approach that can be so common. Yet, even here perhaps, there is a tendency to major on some areas rather than others. Was it me, or does the Irish story tend to predominate overly much at times? The standout chapters for me were chapters 3 and 5, the ones that dealt with the two world wars and their aftermath in religious terms. If there are weaknesses in the book I think I would identify two in the main. Firstly, this is a very institutionally-based, even political history. Robbins is at pains to place the religious developments in their political context, but at times the political story impinges too heavily on the religious story for my liking. The histories of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England also tend to predominate overly much. This is very much a top down history, while some of the other denominations do figure at appropriate points, thy do tend to be overshadowed somewhat. What about all those British Christians who worshipped outside the mainline denominations, in independent fellowships, Brethren Assemblies, or more recently in House Churches? Is the picture Robbins paints necessarily one that reflects the variety in the religious landscape of the British Isles in the twentieth century. Maybe it is, certainly the nonconformist churches seem to have suffered even more catastrophic decline than the Established Church, but on the contemporary scene its precisely those non-denominational churches that seemed to have bucked the otherwise inexorable religious decline with most obvious success. Secondly, for me the most disappointing element of the book is that there is so little on popular religiosity, what did ordinary people, the people who lived through the developments outlined here, actually think and feel? How were their religious lives moulded by these events? While getting at this kind of material can be hard for earlier generations, surely its much easier for the second half of the twentieth century at least? Its the kind of approach that Callum Brown has championed, especially in his The Death of Christian Britain (2001). There is very little in Robbins’ narrative, on balance, on twentieth-century British evangelicalism either. There are a couple of sentences on John Stott – ‘a major evangelical voice’ (p. 380) – Jim Packer doesn’t merit a mention at all, while Martyn Lloyd-Jones is dismissed as a somewhat backward looking Calvinistic Welsh nationalist (p. 370)! I’d have also have appreciated much more on the theological developments within twentieth-century British Christianity. How much did the rise of theological liberalism at the beginning of the twentieth century underlie many of the changes that took place within the churches, as vital elements of Christian belief were undermined, and even ridiculed. In his final chapter Robbins can’t resist looking forward either, bemoaning the abusive position of those intent on dismissing Christianity as a delusion, acting in a far more fundamentalist way than many religious fundamentalists as they call for the dismissal of the Christian perspective from the public square (pp. 474‑5). Robbins’ history is very warmly recommended, but might need to be read alongside the volumes by Hastings and Brown mentioned above, if one is to get a fully rounded picture, as well as some of the specific historical writing on the Christianities of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

So how should evangelicals write about the history of Evangelicalism?

2009-12-22T14:54:00.016Z

I don't often see The Banner of Truth magazine these days, but I happened to pick up the latest issue the other day in my local Christian bookshop, and noticed in the reviews section an appraisal by Iain H. Murray of Mark Smith (ed.), British Evangelical Identities: Past and Present (Paternoster, 2008), a book in which I've got a chapter, and which Murray singles out for special attention in his review (The Banner of Truth, 555 (December, 2009), pp. 31-2.) Murray has become a pretty virulent critic of us evangelical historians who write within the professional academy, accusing us of what he calls a 'concessive policy'; he argues that by accepting the standards of professional academia, which does not allow us to integrate the divine dimension into the history which we write, we have in effect sold out to the 'contemporary secular ethos'. Trenchant comments of this nature from Murray are nothing new; indeed his review of Harry S. Stout's biography of George Whitefield, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Evangelicalism (1991), provoked a spikey exchange of letters between Murray and Stout in the pages of The Banner of Truth magazine in the early '90s [http://http//isae.wheaton.edu/evangelical-studies-bulletin/from-the-isae-vault/]. My own book, A Glorious Work in the World: Welsh Methodism and the International Evangelical Revival, 1735-50 (2004) received similar treatment, potential readers being warned that they would have to 'read into it the spiritual dynamic' if they were going to profit from reading it all (this review was not actually by Murray, I hasten to add, but the views expressed in it are almost identical to those expressed by him elsewhere) (The Banner of Truth, 499 (April, 2005), pp. 25-6). To me the most obvious difference between the way professional academic historians write and the way in which authors like Murray write, lies in their very different methodolgies. Professional historians attempt to approach their subject scientifically, they read primary sources, methodically collect evidence and then draw their conclusions on the basis on that evidence. Now obviously, when it comes to their interpretations all historians are going to be influenced by their presuppositions to some degree, but professional historians at least attempt to set these aside, or work with them consciously, and try to be guided by the weight of the evidence. It seems to me that writers like Murray start with their presuppositions, their theological presuppositions mainly, and then construct their history to fit in with them. The lack of engagement with primary historical sources in much of what Murray writes (with the notable exception of his biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones), is surely evidence of this. Maybe though this, at bottom, is one of the differences between the approach of the professionally trained historian and the amateur, the latter's approach owing more to the antiquarian than the historian. This is not to say that the work produced by the antiquarian does not have its place, its just that its different; professional historians write for their peers, largely, and so they have an inbuilt accountabilty mechanism as members of that professional community. Antiquarians often publish their own work, with all that that means unfortunately for the lack of intellectual accountability. Murray's accusation that evangelical historians within the academy are not able to bring God into their writing is of an altogether more serious nature, since it seems to me to strike at the heart of the integrity of us Christian scholars who attempt to operate within the academy while being faithful to our Christian profession. Murray seems to think that the only form of faithful Christian history is one that makes constant reference to the hand of God in the historical process. I wonder whether writing history is ever that simple? Charting the hand of God in post biblical history is fraught with difficulties and uncertainty, every generation of Christians, of whatever variety, have believed that they have been led by God. Surely the correct approach should be one of humility. While the Christian scholar should want to affirm strongly the role of Divine providence in the historical process, in the sense that God is superintending the history of world to a given end, the return of Jesus, and the creation of the new Heaven's and new Earth, charting his activity on a more mundane day-to-day level is far from easy. Surely we all know this even on a personal level - we can believe that God is leading us in a given way at a given time, only for subsequent events to eventually prove that the exact opposite was the case.

What Murray's approach to history inevitably tends to become is a pantheon of the saints, a collection of ideal historical exemplars who have safeguarded the faith down through the ages, who all look and say much the same, that is they reflect the predilictions of the person who is writing about them. How else could you argue for a kind of evangelical sucessionism that takes in the Apostle Paul, Augustine, a couple of favourite medieval pseudo-evangelical Catholics, Luther, Calvin, the Puritans, the Methodists, the Princeton theologians, Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones, or at least something like that! While there are certainly common themes to all of them, they're all enormously different from one another also. What this kind of approach ends up being is actually pretty ahistorical.

But now to a few of the more substantive issues in Murray's review of British Evangelical Identities:

He clearly dislikes David Bebbington's fourfold characterisation of evangelicalism, wanting something much more theologically detailed one assumes. Yet the great advantage, and it is a big advantage, of Bebbington's taxonomy is that its helps define evangelicalism historically - not theologically! Evangelicals have been those who have stressed the Bible, the cross, conversion and activism; this both allows historians to stress the importance of a number foundational beliefs for evangelicals, and gives enough lattitude for us to reflect the flexibility of the opinions held about those four areas by different groups of evangelicals across the past three centuries.
He criticises my chapter on Methodism and the rise of Evangelicalism in Wales for arguing that the cause of the evangelical revival is to be found in its social and cultural context, rather than in any spiritual explanation. Really? I certainly argue that the social and cultural milieu of the mid eighteenth century gave shape and definition to the shape of evangelicalism, but caused it? I'm not sure I ever really say what, or who, caused it! What my chapter actually argues is that Wales certainly did experience a Great Awakening in the eighteenth century, something that is called into question by the sort of secular historiography that Murray is so suspicious of. But that spiritual awakening was earthed in the mid eighteenth century, the same as every generation of Christians are earthed in their own particular contexts and affected by them in all sorts of ways, some of which they don't even realise themselves. Is it ever right to separate temporal and spiritual explanations in the history of Christianity? Surely, God works through means, constantly, and the shape and feel of evangelical belief, while retaining a consistent doctrinal core, changes and adapts in different periods and cultures. If this were not so evangelicals would be more like the Amish in present day America, clinging to a defunct cultural identity which they've baptised with Christian legitimacy. But then there are plenty of evangelicals who think they live in other generations too, whether it be the 1950s, the 1730s or 1650s! However, the big issue surely concerns passing judgement on where you think God is at work or is not at work. This is surely problematic. N. T. Wright has some appropriate advice which address the problem of identifying the hand of God in history just about perfectly: 'When Christians try to read off what God is doing even in their own situations, such claims always carry the word perhaps about them as a mark of humility and of the necessary reticence of faith. That doesn't mean that such claims can't be made, but that they need to be made with a 'perhaps' which is always inviting God to come in and say: 'Well, actually, No!
Murray is much happier with the chapters in British Evangelical Identities which chart what he calls the current evangelical downgrade, attributable in large part he says to the charismatic movement which has turned attention away from clear doctrinal convicitons. Drawing this kind of conclusion from the evidence presented in these chapters is, of course, legitimate, but perhaps it also highlights the very reason why the kind of detailed careful historical scholarship in the pages of this volume is so needful in the contemporary church. Understanding the past, enables us to understand present trends of course; its in the interpretation of those present trends that most would want to take issue with Murray's analysis.

It may well be then that the kind of humble honest scholarship carried out by evangelical historians of the calibre of David Bebbington, Mark Noll and George Marsden, to name but three, ends up being much more faithful to the complexity of the past, the inconsistent actions of fallen men and women, who rarely live up to some of their highest ideals and therefore also to the Scriptural analysis of humanity and God's activity in the world. This is surely preferable to the kind of simplistic black and white analysis preferred by some who are currently balanced somewhat precariously over on the ring-wing of the evangelical movement.

Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism for the last time!

2009-12-17T20:22:00.008Z

I was in London the early part of the week attending the final gathering of the Evangelical and Fundamentalism project at King's College. This final event was open to a wider audience than the other conferences and symposia which I've blogged about here, the idea being to disseminate the findings of the project to wider public. We had two keynote speakers, Stephen Holmes (St Andrews) and Alister McGrath (Kings), and some space in the middle of the day for three parallel discussion sessions. The project was originally designed to explore whether there was any difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, the popular perception being that evangelicals are little more than the fundamentalist wing of Christianity. Stephen Holmes addressed the issue of evangelicalism, fundamentalism and theology, exploring whether there was any substantive theological difference between the two. Holmes focussed on five areas which tend to preoccupy fundamentalists; attitudes to science, attitudes towards the Bible, ecclesiology, a reactionary mindset and eschatology. However, in each case it proved difficult to make a hard and fast distinction between the opinions and attitudes held by fundamentalists and those of evangelicals more widely. For example, creationism is often seen as one of the key defining features of fundamentalism, yet the contributors to The Fundamentals in the early twentieth century were broadly tolerant of the theory of evolution. Holmes argued that the distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists over science lay more in fundamentalists suspicion of the agenda of scientists, rather than in the scientific method itself. Similarly over ecclesiology, fundamentalists tend towards a seperatist agenda, whereas evangelicals can be more open to other expressions of Christianity. Yet on the surface Billy Graham looks a classic fundamentalist, but has maintained his openness to the wider Christian community from an early point in his public ministry. In his concluding remarks Holmes got perhaps closest to a satisfactory distinction between evangelicalism and fundamentalism, by stressing that the distinction lies more in the felt context of the two movements than in any actual theological difference. Fundamentalists have tended to be marked by a more embattled mentality than evangelicals. Evangelicals were imbued with a positivism that they soaked-up from their eighteenth century enlightenment milieu. When evangelicals lost that positive edge, they tended to morph into fundamentalists. The afternoon session by Alister McGrath looked at the attitude of fundamentalists and evangelicals towards science. This is of course a very live issue in the contemprary world, and McGrath's paper inevitably engaged heavily with Richard Dawkins and the new atheism. This did have the feeling of being recycled material from another paper; for me the most interesting parts of his paper were the more closely argued historical sections. He started by saying that there is no stark distinction between the attitudes taken by fundamentalists and evangelicals towards science; indeed hostility towards science and scientists has ebbed and flowed. Some evangelicals have been incredibly positive of the scientific agenda, the critical point coming when science seems to become totalising, pushing the need for a transcedent creator to the margins or out of the picture altogether. This argument was fleshed out in a number of case studies, none more interesting than the response of B. B. Warfield to Darwin's theory of evolution. Warfield was, of course, one of the main champions of biblical inerrancy, but saw no problem in harmonising evolution and the Genesis account of creation. For Warfield the key problem with Darwin lay not with evolution as a possible explantion of the process of creation, but with its doing away with any sort of teleology in nature. Warfield attempted to bring this teleology back into Darwinian evolution - he saw no need to interpret Genesis literally because of his underlying committment to the absolute truthfulness of Scripture. McGrath then sketched in the ebb and flow of evangelical hostility to science, reaching peaks in the 1920s, before receding into the background in the mid twentieth century, before its more recent re-occupation of centre stage in evangelical engagement with contemporary culture. Here he stressed that what is at stake in contemporary debates is the cultural hegemony of science, science has in effect replaced religion in giving sense and order to the world. While there was much in this paper of relevance to the project and of wider interest, it was much less focussed on delineating some of the distinctions, if indeed it is possible to make any distinctions, between the attitudes which evangelicals and fundamentalists have taken towards science. The conference ended with a short paper by David Bebbington drawing the strands of the project together and presenting some of our conclusions. While we did not come up with a neat one line definition of Fundamentalism, we did reach some fairly solid conclusions. Fundamentalism was certainly present in Britain in the early twentieth century and beyond; evangelicals have a tendency towards Fundamentalism in certain circumstances, but evangelicalism and fundamentalism are not one and the same thing!

All quiet on the blogging front!

2009-11-27T20:28:00.005Z

I've not had a lot a time to do much on the blog for the last month or so I'm afraid. Teaching has been pretty hectic so far this semester, and I've been busy finishing a couple of short writing projects and getting to work on my biography of Elwyn Davies, the founder of the Evangelical Movement of Wales. I've finished writing a 6,000 word chapter on the history of evangelicalism in Wales since the eighteenth century, and an introduction to a book on religions in Wales. This book will contain about 20 chapters on various religious groups in Wales, I've written three chapters, one on Wesleyan Methodism, one on Pentecostalism and the other on Evangelicalism. It should be out next year, published by the Welsh Academic Press. The Elwyn Davies biography is going really well so far. I'm at the gathering information stage just now, travelling about interviewing people who were involved in the early years of the Evangelical Movement of Wales. Its been a great experience so far, if a bit different from what I usually do, but its early days yet. Teaching should all be done by early December anyway, and I'm off to London for the final conference of the Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism network, at King's College in the week before Christmas. Alister McGrath is the keynote speaker this time; details can be found here: http://www.eauk.org/efb/conference-information.cfm.

Jim Packer - one of God's giants?

2009-10-12T10:34:00.008+01:00

J. I. Packer has been one of the most influential voices in recent evangelical history on both sides of the Atlantic, indeed when discussing twentieth century evangelicalism Packer, John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones tend to be lumped together as the three great leaders of the movement. There has been some limited reappraisal of Lloyd-Jones' influence, relatively little on John Stott so far, and only Alister McGrath's biography of Packer, which appeared in 1996. Packer turned 80 in 2006, and to recognise this a conference was held at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, to dicsuss Packer's influence and legacy. Timothy George (ed.), J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future: The Impact of his Life and Thought (Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Academic, 2009) contains the published versions of the papers delivered at the conference. There is not a weak paper in the whole volume, and most of them deserve some comment, but I'll limit myself to commenting on just one or two of them. For many their main contact with Packer comes through his Knowing God. I must admit to being a bit of late comer to it personally, although agree entirely with many of the contributors here about its beauty and importance. One of Packer's key contributions has been his defense of a traditional evangelical understanding of the doctrine of scripture, particularly the idea of biblical inerrancy. Two chapters here deal with his understanding of Scripture, those by Don Payne and Paul House. I found some of the sections in Payne's chapter where he discusses how Packer's linking of God's communicating today with the pages of Scripture deeply moving: 'humans connect with the person of God through understanding the rational content of the mind of God. Scripture is so closely allied with God's mind that to know God personally is impossible apart from the rational content of Scripture . . . Scripture is not sterile, impersonal information but the means through which God relates to humanity personally' (p. 58). For me Packer's best book is Among God's Giants (1991), his papers and essays on the Puritans. I probably read it at a key moment in my own Christian pilgrimage, and its was one of those books that proved so influential to me and my current career path. A number of the essays, by Mark Dever and Bruce Hindmarsh, look at Packer's work on the Puritans, using the idea of retrieving riches from the Church's past to enrich and inform it in the present. One wonders though how influential this creative engagement with the past has been. Outside of some select circles the tendency of evangelicals to ignore their history is still pretty pervasive! For me the most provocative chapter in the collection was Carl Trueman's assessment of Packer from the perpective of an English nonconformist. Of course, Packer has played little part in evangelicalism on this side of the Atlantic since his relocation to Regent College, Vancouver, in 1979. The reasons for this are many, but the fallout between him and Martyn Lloyd-Jones after 1966 and the relatively cool response that his highly theological puritan-driven vision of Anglicanism got from the resurgent evangelical Anglicanism of the 1970s and 1980s, very heavily influenced by the charismatic renewal, often made him appear a lonely figure on this side of the Atlantic. Examining the relationship between Lloyd-Jones and Packer, Trueman casts Packer as the lost leader of English nonconformist evangelicals, suggesting that if Packer had heeded Lloyd-Jones' call and left Anglicanism then maybe he would have been the pre-eminent influence within late twentieth-century reformed evangelicalism, rather than Lloyd-Jones as turned out to be the case. For Trueman, Lloyd-Jones' call for evangelicals to come together in 1966 was certainly visionary, where that call faltered was in Lloyd-Jones' lack of a clear strategy, beyond a loose confederation of quasi-independent churches, once individuals had quit their denominations. Packer, in Trueman's view, would have championed a more confessional evanglelicalism, rather than the sort of 'lowest common denominator, conservative, experiential evangelicalism' (p. 121) preferred by Lloyd-Jones. Of course, this interpretation represents Trueman's own preferences to a great extent, a Presbyterian teaching at one of the bastions of Reformed scholastic Calvinism, Westminister Seminary in the US. Trueman's preference for a more theological evangelical unity, and probably a unity of reformed evangelicals and few others, was something that Lloyd-Jones was trying to guard against. Maybe in calling for a broad evangelical unity, Lloyd-Jones was more in tune with the spirit of historic evangelicalism than Trueman appreciates. Hasn't evangelicalism, since the eighteenth century at least, always been a loose confederation of Christians, agreed on the essentials of the gospel, but prepared to differ on other matters, deemed not essential to salvation? Was Lloyd-Jones' call for evangelicals to stand together, at a time when he perceived the very future of evangelicalism to be under threat (whether you agree with that slightly conspiratorial assessment or not), a call for evangelicals to major on the things that bound them together, to maximise their strength and witness, rather than to disipate it by wrangling over secondary issues? In Lloyd-Jones vision of evangelical unity Arminians and Calvinists, Pentecostals and Cessationists, and later charismatics, Baptists, Presbyterians etc would have been able to maintain their distinct identities, while also expressing their affinity with other evangelicals. Would the kind of doctrinal unity which Trueman wishes Packer to have championed actually have ended up leading to even greater disipation of energy; isn't the kind of Calvinist confessionalism that underpins Trueman's analysis merely a recipe for further fragmentation as Calvinists disagree over who is the most Calvinist? Trueman also makes a distinction between Packer's championing of proper Reformed theology, and Lloyd-Jones' Reformed theology, which because it was 'read through the grid of eighteenth-century revivalism' wasn't really Reformed at all (pp. 126-7), but much closer to mysticism (p. 119). What was it I was saying about arguments among the Reformed about who was the most Reformed? This is a wonderful book of essays, with lots of thought-provoking material on every page. Its all rounded off with a repsonse from Packer himself, who concludes the volume with some judicious reflections about the future prospects for evangelicalism. There's plenty of evidence here that Packer should certainly take his place in the pantheon of God's giants!!

A new term and some new writing projects!

2009-10-09T09:39:00.006+01:00

Activity on the blogging front has been a bit quiet for the last month or so; September is always hectic trying to finish off writing projects before all the students return! I managed to finish my chapter on evangelicalism in Wales from the 1730s to the present day, and in the end wrote a piece that concentrated mostly on the twentieth century. This week I've started work on my new project, the biography of Elwyn Davies. Its all a bit daunting just now, so much material to plough through over the next months. There'll also be lots of people to meet and interview for the book, which will be a new experience since most of the material I usually have to use for the things I write about is written by people who've been dead for a very very long time!! I've also just been appointed the editor of the Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society. The journal comes out three times a year and has Wesley and Methodist studies as its main focus. Its very widely read around the world, and I'm looking forward to taking up the role next year. So its lots of teaching and long hours researching and thinking for the next few months . . . . .

Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Life and Legacy conference

2009-09-27T22:28:00.005+01:00

I'm organising a conference with a friend of mine, Andrew Atherstone, to examine the life and legacy of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of the leading British evangelicals of the twentieth century. The conference will be held at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, on 16-17 December 2010, and jointly sponsored by the Centre for the Advanced Study of Religion in Wales and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. The keynote speakers have already been booked and include David Bebbington (Stirling), who'll give a contextual paper on evangelicalism in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century; Densil Morgan (Bangor), will speak on Lloyd-Jones and Calvinism; William Kay (Bangor) on Lloyd-Jones' relationship with the Charismatic Movement, Andrew Atherstone (Oxford) on Lloyd-Jones and the aftermath of the 1966 call for evangelical unity and I'll be speaking on Lloyd-Jones and Wales, with particular attention to his role in the establishment of the Evangelical Movement of Wales. We've just issued a call for papers, and are welcoming short papers of about half an hour's duration on any aspect of Lloyd-Jones' life, impact or legacy. Papers are warmly welcomed from those in academic positions and those not, we'll do our best to accommodate as many of these offers as we receive, although we obviously can't promise that we'll be able to accept every single one. The hope is ultimately to produce a volume of evaluative essays. If you'd like to contribute a paper please send a title and an abstract (c.250 words) to me at dmj@aber.ac.uk.

Dallas Willard and real knowledge

2009-09-08T18:52:00.004+01:00

I've been reading Dallas Willard's new book Personal Religion, Public Reality? Towards a Knowledge of Faith (2009) over the last couple of weeks or so, and want to blog a few thoughts about it. Willard is probably best known, at least in the UK, for his books on discipleship and the spiritual disciplines; The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988) and The Divine Conspiracy (1998), but he is also a Professor of Philosophy in the University of Southern California, and his latest book brings both facets of his writing, philosophical and more explicitly Christian, into closer alignment than some of his previous offerings. Its a very rich, multi-layered book, as many of Willard's books are, so I'm not going to comment on all of it; suffice to say that in many ways it works as an excellent rejoinder to Richard Dawkins et al, since its purpose is to show how Christian knowledge is reliable knowledge, not some pie in the sky when you die form of wishful thinking. He takes great pains in the opening chapters of the book to define knowledge and faith. Taking an historical approach he shows how, since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, faith has been evacuated of its knowledge content. Knowledge has come to be seen as something that can be proven rationally while Christian knowledge has been relegated to the category of mere belief or commitment. Faith has become little more than the proverbial 'leap in the dark'. Christians, he writes, 'are urged to treat their central beliefs as something other than knowledge, something in fact far short of knowledge' (p. 1). While he traces this development philosophically, he argues that even within the Christian Church confidence in Christian knowledge has evaporated (p. 26). The commonly accepted view is that 'religion stands free of knowledge, that is requires only faith or commitment' (p. 4). His solution is that Christians regain confidence in Christianity as a body of unique knowledge, of revelation if you like. The biblical narratives teach throughout that an act of faith is always taken on a firm knowledge foundation. 'Faith is commitment to action, often beyond our natural abilities, based upon knowledge of God and his ways' (pp. 21-2). As I said earlier, there's much here that I could comment on, such is the richness of Willard's book, but I'll limit myself to what he has to say about the role of universities in the knowledge economy. To be honest I'm still processing much of this and thinking through some of its implications, so some of what follows might actually read more like a summary of what Willard has to say with some questions and observations thrown in. Willard identifies universities as the arbiters of knowledge in our society, institutions that determine what is knowledge and what is not. Their processes of determining what is real knowledge is based on research, but the test of good reseach is not the truth or knowledge achieved, but the use of good scholarly methodology and the opinions of the leading thinkers in a given field - a pretty damning indictment really, and one I'm not sure I'd want to endorse unreservedly. Where he is on surer footing is in his critique of the problem of academic specialisation. Indeed, knowledge has become so specialised that academics have little, if anything, to say to what he calls the primary questions of life. So, says Willard, 'real life . . . is abandoned by our knowledge institutions to feeling, force, politics and traditions. Ragtag, incoherent answers float here and there, with no responsible clarification and critique' (p. 65). In all, Willard's diagnosis is pretty bleak, but surely not that far from reality. His solution, at least as far as Christian academics are concerned is radical. We are criticised for teaching as knowledge exactly what secular institutions teach. We need to present the basic points of Christian knowledge with confidence, as an essential body of knowledge which the world needs to hear, not one that is against knowlege, or that in some quasi-spiritual way subverts secular/rational knowledge. He writes, in what to me is the most startling sentence in the whole book. We should 'no longer think of Christ . . . as an airhead who stands haplessly before people with PhDs' (p. 239). His challenge to Christian academics to relate the 'basic things they believe as Christians to their reponsibility for knowledge in their professional field' (p. 240) is not a new challenge of course. But maybe his methodology is more helpful than some of what has gone before. Willard argues that faith needs to be understood as dealing with things that can also be known, 'only when faith is at home with knowledge, does the project of integrating faith and learning have a manageable sense' (p. 241). Anybody who has read Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) will find Dallas Willard a stimulating conversation partner. I'm still mulling over the implications of his arguments in this area alone. There's much else in the book too; a wonderful chapter on discipleship, and a provocative, if slightly obtuse chapter on Christian pluralism. So, if anybody else has read this, or is inspired to read it, I'd be interested in the conversation partner . . .

Reading and writing

2009-08-25T22:19:00.004+01:00

Well we had a good break in Northern Ireland and now its back to a month's worth of writing before the students, and there are going to be more than ever before this coming academic year, arrive back in Aberystwyth. At the minute I'm trying to spend no more than a week working on the revisions to my essay on the Calvinism of the Calvinistic Methodists. As always this is turning out to be a slightly bigger job than I expected, but I've done a fair bit of additional reading since I wrote the first draft of the paper earlier in the summer so its worth trying to incorporate as much of that as possible. Hopefully next week I can then start writing my essay on evangelicalism in Wales, after finally deciding to go for it in the end. I decided to do it mainly for the reasons outlined in my earlier blog post, but I think I'll definitely skew the chapter towards the twentieth century. The past month or two I've been awakening an interest in reading fiction. I'm embarrassed to say that its taken the best part of 35 years, but it was reading the Marilynne Robinson books that really sparked my interest - its a good diversion from all the history and theology at least. The past few weeks I've been reading some of the novels in the Library of Wales series (http://www.libraryofwales.co.uk/). The first one I picked up was Rhys Davies', The Withered Root (1927), which is the fictional account of Wales' last religious revival in 1904. It follows the story of Reuben Daniels, a young charismatic revivalist, and his followers the Corinthians, who shoot to fame almost overnight. The book is a thinly veiled satire on Evan Roberts of course; Daniels like Roberts ends his life in obscurity, although unlike Roberts, Daniels is unable to come to terms with his sexual desires and finds them overpowering his religious devotion in the end. I've moved on to Gwyn Thomas this week, and am trying to read his 1940s novel, The Alone to the Alone. Alongside this I'm reading Dallas Willard's new book, Personal Religion, Public Reality? (2009); I'll blog about it in due course.

Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism in early twentieth century Wales

2009-08-09T15:16:00.010+01:00

R. B. Jones was one of the most prominent evangelicals in early twentieth-century Wales, one of the leaders of the 1904-5 revival and one of the standard bearers of conservative evangelicalism during the inter-war years. To date he has received relatively little scholarly attention, something which Noel Gibbard's, R. B. Jones: Gospel Ministry in Turbulent Times (Bryntirion Press, 2009), attempts to put right. Gibbard's biographical study engages closely, even exhaustively, with the primary source material throughout, but presents a picture of Jones that is perhaps substantially different from the image of the firebrand fundamentalist warrior that has persisted in those works that have made mention of him to date. Gibbard prefers to depict him as an 'enlightened fundamentalist' (p. 179). Where Gibbard's biography is not quite so strong is in its lack of engagement with the relevant secondary historiography. Indeed, beyond reference to some of the author's other books and the work of Brynmor P. Jones, hardly any secondary literature is cited at all. This results in a study that is excellent on some of the details of R. B. Jones' life and minstry, but one that is one-dimensional, poor even, on the wider currents that were shaping Welsh nonconformity and evangelicalism during these important decades. The book falls into two parts; the first seven chapters deal with the main features of Jones' life, the last four being more analytical. Maybe the book would have been more effective if the analysis had been woven into the preceding narrative more consistently. R. B. Jones spent the whole of his ministry pastoring a number of baptist churches in the Rhondda valley, most famously Tabernacle, Porth. The picture that emerges from Gibbard's study is of an energetic and committted pastor, albeit one who was often distracted by worldwide travel and his many other extra-congregational commitments. In the first chapter, Gibbard mentions some of the influences that proved key in Jones' development, a band of Rhondda, even Merthyr, based evangelical nonconformist ministers; Keswick spirituality, the evangelistic missions of Torrey and Alexander, dispensationalism and premillenialism. More on Jones' theological education would have been welcome, particularly given the rise of theological liberalism in much of Welsh nonconformity. An awareness of the wider context of Jones' theological development would have enabled Gibbard to see parallels with other individuals and countries as well; higher-life teaching, mass-evangelism, dispensationalism and pre-millenial eschatology were ubiqitous throughout much of english-speaking evangelicalism. These were the roots of inter-war fundamentalism; Jones' thought was clearly rooted in the wider developments of the time, you wouldn't necessarily pick this up from this study! As it stands Gibbard prefers to deal with Jones' theological views in a separate chapter that merely describes his opinions using largely his own words (chapter 8). A missed opportunity! Gibbard devotes a separate chapter to Jones' involvement in the 1904-5 revival, which shows the full extent of his itinerant ministry at the height of the revival. Jones never really got on with Evan Roberts, and consistently distanced himself from him on account of his 'mystical strain' and because he thought that Roberts had become 'a spectacle rather than a prophet' (pp. 148-9). There was a similar distancing from Jessie Penn-Lewis also. One of the chief benefits of Gibbard's book is that it further helps us to understand the multi-faceted nature of the Welsh Revival, that it was actually about far more than Evan Roberts. The most extensive studies of R. B. Jones prior to Gibbard's book have been a number of articles by David Bebbington. In these Jones is portrayed as one of the leading voices of fundamentalism in Britain; Gibbard tries, not altogether succssfully it must be said, to distance Jones from some of the worst excesses of American-style fundamentalism. The first thing that needs to be said is that Gibbard does not engage with the extensive literature on fundamentalism that has recently appeared, not even to the well-known work of George M. Marsden. Then, little reference is made to Jones' abrasive personality. Indeed the picture of Jones on the cover of the book is a million miles away from the stereotype of the fundamentalist demagogue. His more austere side does come out occassionally though; some were put off by his 'other worldliness' and 'monkish detachment', but were keen to stress that 'Mr Jones' austere purity is communicable' (p. 94). Other criticised him for his unwillingness to take part in the life of his local community; indeed this is one of the more glaring omissions from the book, no mention is made of either the Great War nor the General Strike of 1926, two of the most cataclysmic events in twentieth century Wales. Does this reflect Jones' own detachment, or that of the author? One of the strongest pieces of evidence in support of Jones' fundamentalist credentials relates to his founding of the South Wales Bible Training Institute in 1919. Although the reasons behind Jones' foundation of the college are not elaborated upon here (see Noel Gibbard's, Taught to Serve: A History: the history of Barry and Bryntirion (1996) for more), the advance of liberalism in the Welsh denominational theological colleges was the over-riding reason. Again, there was nothing unique in Jones' actions here; Gibbard mentions his visit to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, but doesn't really address what Jones learned at Moody and whether the South Wales college was in conscious imitation of it. An awareness of the wider Bible College movement would have informed Gibbard's discussion. What these new colleges did, of course, was to lead some evangelical students away from mainstream theological debate, to be suspicious of the intellect and unable to combat the liberal theology that was rife among the main denominations. For many of the students who attended the Porth school, the result was usually isolation and cultural retreat. While Jones himself certainly shared in this fundamentalist tendancy, his own theological reading seems to have been genuinely wide. Gibbard mentions his awareness of the new-fangled kenotic theory relating to the person of Christ, and his contribution to debates about the humanity of Christ, and even his recommendation of the writings of Karl Barth (p. 191). Yet his welcoming of William Bell Riley, Gresham Machen and T. T. Shields to lecture at the college would tend to suggest that he was consciously alligning himself with the more militant wing of American fundamentalism. A similar mixed asessment of his fundamentalist credentials can be seen in Jones' attitude towards theological liberalism within his own denomination. He took a very public role in opposition to T. R. Glover's nomination as Vice President of the Baptist Union in 1924, for example, but this oposition did not lead him to secede from the denomination. Jones seems not to have been attracted to the idea of eclesiastical separatism, surely a key feature of fundamentalism. Indeed, Jones was one a number of prominent Welsh evangelical nonconformist ministers, W. S. Jones (Llwynypia), Nantlais Williams and E. Keri Evans, who remained committed to fight theological liberalism within their respective denominations. In this Jones was perhaps not quite as fundamentalistic as has often been assumed. Noel Gibbard has produced an attractive and sympathetic portrayal of R. B. Jones, one that certainly goes some considerable way towards successfully portraying him as a more moderate fundamentalist. Where the book is slightly disapointing is in Gibbard's lack of awareness of the wider evangelical context in which Jones both developed and worked. The only part of the book in which Gibbard does engage critically with the interpretations of others is in the concluding pages where he takes issue with Iain Murray's dismissal of Jones in the latter's biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Murray makes some ridiculously over-stated accusations about Jones' lack of a theology (for which read that he wasn't a Calvinist) and claims that his college led people into a theological cul de sac. Of course, Murray is keen to downplay the significance of the inter-war years in Wales, as elsewhere, in order to serve his thesis about evangelical decline following the death of Spurgeon and the beginning of the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, but the fruitful ministry of R. B. Jones and other evangelicals in Wales during these years, whether one agrees with every aspect of their theological position or not, patently shows how unfounded that line of argument actually is.

Summer Holiday's at last

2009-07-31T14:53:00.003+01:00

I've had my head down for the past month or so trying to finish the last chapters of my book on Calvinistic Methodism. Thankfully, its all done - finished the final chapter this week, so my 35,000 contribution is done. Just waiting for the contribution of my co-authors now, and then the big editing process starts. Hopefully the book will be with the University of Wales Press before the end of the summer and then published next year sometime. Next up are some revisions to the paper I gave at the Calvin conference in Geneva back at the end of May, to be published in a special issue of the Welsh Journal of Religious History. Then I have to write the introduction to a book on The Religious History of Wales which I'm co-editing with a friend. This book includes over twenty chapters on the different Welsh religious communities since 1700. I've already written a chapter on Wesleyan Methodism and Pentecostalism in Wales, but am thinking of writing a further chapter on the history of evangelicalism in Wales. I'm still mulling over whether to do this since evangelicalism is convered in many of the chapters which discuss the different Welsh denominations, but I think a separate discussion of evangelicalism is needed, maybe with its focus skewed towards twentieth century developments - something to mull over on holidays! All of these are really preliminary to the start of a major new research project in the autumn. I'm going to write a biography of Elwyn Davies, the founder of the Evangelical Movement of Wales, and therefore a leading figure in the development of evangelicalism in Wales in the second half of the twentieth century. There' s lots of archival material to look at at the EMW headquarters in Bridgend and quite a substantial body of correspondence too. I'm not really sure yet how the project will pan out, or how substantial the biography will be, but it'll be good to get started on it after lots of discussions over the past year or so! So its off to Northern Ireland on Monday for a fortnight; looking forward to negotiating the giant stepping-stones that make up the Giant's Causeway again with the four ladies in my life!

Heresy hunting!!

2009-07-31T13:33:00.005+01:00

Martin Downes' recently published Risking the Truth: Handling Error in the Church (Christian Focus, 2009) has been getting quite a bit of attention of late, so I thought I'd take a peek. As its title suggests its intended to be an examination of how Christians depart from orthodoxy and how churches should handle unorthodox teaching and teachers. Its novelty lies in its approach; a series of twenty interviews with various semi well-known figures within the Reformed world on both sides of the Atlantic (although there is one token chapter by an African baptist pastor!). Unavoidably with a book of this nature the quality of the chapters is a bit patchy, with some interviewees not really engaging all that fully with the questions. Downes tops and tails the book with a couple of short pieces, one introducing the idea of heresy in fairly broad terms, and a final chapter which is a short exposition of the way in which Paul deals with false teaching in 1 Timothy. Some of the interviews are really excellent, although I did find the practice of asking many of the contributors more or less the same questions slightly repetative. Carl Trueman's interview stood-out, particularly his helpful comments on some of the tension facing Christian's working in 'secular' universities, teasing out the distinction between academic integrity and academic respectability (pp. 36-7). Also helpful, if a little alarmist in places, were Ligon Duncan's comments on N. T. Wright and the New Perspective on Paul, and Greg Beale's perceptive interview about biblical inerrancy. The best and most humane chapter, I thought, was the one by Michael Ovey, the principal of the Anglican Oak Hill College in London, with its balanced and pastorally sensitive awareness of the ease with which one call fall into error, and how it should be dealt with I guess a book like this is also a useful barometer of the current state of some aspects of the Reformed world, and particularly the issues that preoccupy them. The current bete noirs are obviously the New Perspective, but also up there is the Federal Vision theology of Norman Shepherd, and of course penal substitutionary atonement. The book is very heavily skewed towards the American Reformed communities, with a strong representation from Presbyterians, drawn from Westminster and Reformed Theological Seminary. Repeatedly the importance of confessionalism is stressed, especially in Michael Horton's chapter unsurprisingly, and there seems to me to be a very real attempt among many from this constituency to distance themselves from the wider currents of American evangelicalism. This is wholly understandable, but a real shame.

I thought the book was also disappointing from a British perspective. Its published by the Scottish Christian Focus press, so I'm guessing that its primarily inteded for a British readership; in that case why not include more interviews with British authors? With the exception of the chapter by Michael Ovey, these seemed much weaker and less well-focussed. Geoffrey Thomas' chapter was bizarre really; a folksy mix of his own personal likes and dislikes, and in too many instances he just didn't answer the questions. His chapter also struck a fairly anti-intellectual tone; the people he preaches to not really being interested in current theological trends, and that in a university town, being just the most glaring example (p. 161). My guess is that there's just not the same level of theological engagement among the British Reformed constituency, at least at an institutional level, as there is in some of the pockets of American reformed evangelicalism. The paucity of chapters with the very different British context in mind, does hamper the usefulness of the book to some extent. So an interesting book, certainly worth looking at closely, especially if you want to get a feel for the current mood of this sector of the Reformed world, the old Calvinists if you like! I couldn't help but draw comparisons with the very different mood of the New Calvinists in the United States, who seem much more confident, up-beat and with their stress on the missional imperative, much more culturally engaged; but then cultural engagement has never really been a priority among British Reformed evangelicals!!!

Undercover among American evangelicals

2009-07-30T10:14:00.004+01:00

There's a bit of a vogue at the minute, particularly in the United States, for books that feature undercover investigations into the American evangelical scene. The most recent is Kevin Roose's, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner' s Semester at America's Holiest University (2009). Roose, an English literature student at the arch-liberal Brown university in Rhode Island, goes on a semester's exchange at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. The book is incredibly funny, people in the cafe were looking askance at me the other day as I laughed outloud at some bits of it, account of Roose's experiences, but it ends up far from being a diatribe against some of the worst excesses of American fundamentalism.

Roose seems to have been metored in the writing process by A. J. Jacobs, whose A Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007), is, just as the subtitle says, Jacob's hilarious account of his attempt to put ALL of the commands of the Bible, both Old and New Testament into practice! Roose's narrative is given add piquancy by the fac t that he conducted the final interview with Jerry Falwell, just a couple of weeks before his death, during the final week of Roose time at Liberty. Falwell was probably the leading evangelical figure, after Billy Graham I guess, in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, but his stock-in-trade are his highly-offensive remarks about those who disagree with his conservative views, most famously of course, his blaming of the 9/11 terror attacks on feminists, homosexuals and abortionists in the US. In person, the Falwell Roose actually meets comes over as more friendly and genial than his rabid comments might lead one to expect, not that that's much comfort I guess. But from the sermons and addresses Falwell gave during Roose's time at Liberty, he seems to specialise in folksy self-help as much as anything else. Having said this his hour-long sermon/diatribe against global warming was plain ludicrous! On the last page or so Roose muses on the incongruity of Falwell's grave, the headstone on which is a ten-foot limestone cross, topped with an eternal flame powered by a propane feed. 'A former segregationist, and the way you memorialize him is by erecting a burning cross?' (p. 310).

Falwell, though, represents a very particular brand of American evangelicalism; the process of conversion is reduced to praying the sinner's prayer, new Christians are then loaded with a set of rules to live by, no smoking, no drinking, no dancing, no watching suspect movies, spending too much time alone with members of the opposite sex etc etc - you get the picture! Theologically, young earth creationism and the Rapture figure pretty highly in every conversation it seems, and there' s an assumption that only those who support the Republican party are true Christians and true Americans (not sure which if these two is most important from the book to be honest!). What emerges is a highly legalistic version of evangelicalism, fundamentalism with no fun whatsover if you like!

The star of the book is really Roose himself, and following his story during his semster at Liberty becomes quite compelling. He arrives with many of the expected preconceptions, but its to the credit of many of the students at Liberty, with whom he lives in what seems like very close quarters, that these preconceptions very quickly melt away as the kindness, prayerfulness and cameraderie of the students wins him over. He never really gets close to conversion, whatever that means at Liberty, but his journey certainly helps him to bridge some of the chasms of America's Culture Wars. I suppose my biggest concern throughout was what Liberty students actually thought the gospel was; this comes through very forcibly on a week-long evangelism trip Roose takes with some students to Daytona Beach in Florida. The method of evangelism seems to be to hit people as hard and aggresively as possible with the idea that they're on the road to Hell, and get them to pray the slightly vaccuous sinner's prayer. No wonder the number of people in the US who claim to be born again is so high, if this style of evangelism if so prevalent. One wishes that Roose had encountered more Christians who had a greater sense of the complexity of Scripture, and who located godliness in the person of Jesus and the practice of radical discipleship, rather than a list of do's and dont's.

So if your looking for some light Summer reading, Roose's book is very highly recommended. There's lots in that will make you laugh out loud, and tons that will make you wince too!

Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (2009)

2009-07-27T19:00:00.007+01:00

Peter J. Thuesen's, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford, 2009) has been an engrosing read over the lask week or so. With a largely American focus, although there's plenty on the British context as well, Thuesen's book is a grand sweeping narrative of the role which debates over the concept of Predestiantion have played in American religion and society since the arrival of the Puritan settlers in the seventeenth century, and his narrative brings the story right up to the present day with a discussion of Rick Warren's ubiquitous The Purpose Driven Life. At little more than 220 pages of actual text, its far from an exhaustive treatment, but rather selects key stopping-off points along the way. Neither is it really the historical theology in the strictest sense of the term, but rather an intellectual history, that focusses more on the social impact of the role which predestination has played in American society.

What is remarkable is how frequent and how sophisticated predestinarian debate has been within American religion and society, and indeed to some extent still is even today, with the concept of the American people being a chosen people and America being a city on a hill being commonplace.

Thuesen begins with a really useful introduction which charts some of the key ways in which predestination was understood before the foundation of America. There's an excellent examination of Augustine's views about election, and then a useful discussion of how Aquinas' view informed much of the medieval Catholic Church. His sections on Puritanism reflect the current state of the literature really well, showing that there was no agreed interpretation of the doctrine among the English Puritans, and that the legacy of Calvin was bitterly fought over. The role of William Perkins in developing a supralapsarian understanding of the divine decrees is particuarly helpful (don't worry there's a very full glossary of theological terms provided at the end!!), as is his painting in of the different interpretation of key biblical passages on the nature of God's election and foreknowledge among the later Puritans. This discussion is then followed by a chapter on the specific American context, where the basic argument concerns the modification of strict Calvinist beliefs, with redefinitions of the exact nature of God's foreknowledge and the precise meaning of double predestiantion, particularly reprobation.

I was slightly disappointed by Thuesen's discussion of predestinarian debates in the eighteenth century, particularly among the new evangelical movement. There's some discussion of the Wesley/Whitefield debate, as well as the later still more acrimonious Toplady/Wesley contretemps, but I'd have liked to have seen more reflection on its significance. I guess this is only because I'm trying to write up my paper on the Calvinism of the Calvinistic Methodists at the minute. John Wesley tends to be seen as the innovator by Thuesen which he certainly was, but maybe Whitefield was more of an innovator than Thuesen gives him credit. Although Whitefield was a Calvinist, he was no double predestinarian, at least in the strict sense of the term, his Calvinism looking more like Augustine's version than Calvin's in actual fact. I've got a thesis that I'm toying with at the moment that Whitefield popularised a moderate Calvinism in the eighteenth century, that only really stressed God's active decree of election and that prioritised the indiscriminate offer of the gospel, in contradistinction to the hyper-Calvinism prevalent among some prominent London baptists. I'd also have liked to have seen some discussion of Alan Clifford's views relating to Wesley really being an Amyraldian, rather than an outright Arminian.

In the rest of the book Thuesen looks at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Second Great Awakening threw up a myriad of different groups on the edges of Protestant orthodoxy; the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh-Day Adventists among others. Thuesen charts these less immediately accessible waters with some skill, as he does the role of predestinarian debates among nineteenth-century American Caltholics and Lutherans, particularly surrounding the establishment of the Missouri Synod Lutherans. The chapter on the twentieth century is more impressionistic; discussion on the changing of the Westminster Confession plays a prominent role, including the fascinating participation of US president Benjamin Harrison, who was also a prominent figure in northern Presbyterian ecclesiastical politics. There is some discussion of the fundamentalist controversy of course, but maybe J. Gresham Machen and Westminster Seminary deserved more prominence.

On the more contemporary scene, Thuesen's helpfully charts the intricacies of the recent Reformed coup within the Southern Baptist Convention, whose figurehead these day is Al Mohler, the current presdent of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville, Kentucky. There's not much discussion of the nature of the Calvinism espoused by some of these figures, although the more arch-conservative Founders group does crop up. Of course, Mohler is a very prominent voice in the current new Calvinist awakening in the US, figuring prominently in Collin Hansen's Young Restless and Reformed (2007). Again I'd have liked to have seen more discussion of the movement, particularly of its place in the long reformed continuum in the US. But then I guess, its Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life which is the bestselling Christian book in America currently, and Warren has a strong emphasis on the way in which God has a plan for the life of every Christian, suggesting an element of predestianarianism at least. In the end though Warren's book is pretty light on theology, and my reading suggests that there's an eclectic chosing of those elements of classic reformed theology that appeal most to the modern purpose-driven mentality, without a serious engagement with the notion of God's predestinating grace.

Having said all this, Thuesen has written a terrific book - thought provoking thoroughout. Obviously with this kind of book, which is pretty short and only really intended to sketch in the broad picture, there much that I'd like to see developed much much further. But I guess that's for others to do now that Thuesen has sketched in the context.

Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ

2009-07-16T14:42:00.006+01:00

I've just finished reading John G. Turner's in depth study: Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Relatively unknown in Britain, Campus Crusade is an ubiquitous presence on college and university campuses in the United States, more so than the Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship even. It differs from IVCF (UCCF in Britain) in that its focus has, until relatively recently, been very much on evangelism, rather than the nurture and development of generations of students.

Bill Bright is not one of those names that trips off the tongue when talking about late twentieth-century American evangelicalism. Turner's book restores him to his rightful place in that story, at one point claiming that if Billy Graham was America's pastor, Carl Henry American evangelicalism's theologian, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson the champions of American evangelical political engagement and Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker its leading TV evangelists, then Bill Bright was a genuine evangelical multi-tasker straddling all four worlds - quite an audicious claim really, but one that's not without some truth! (pp. 23-4).

Obviously, Turner's book foregrounds the narrative history of Campus Crusade, and includes much valuable detail on some of the internal debates that have marked its development, but the book is about much more than this as well. Its sub-plot is the story of how evangelicalism in the United States has escaped from the separatist and fundamentalist ghetto to a much more open and engaged position. On Campus Crusade itself, Turner comments effectively on Bill Bright's leadership hinting where necessary at his autocratic style, and his inability to deal effectively with differences within his staff team. Turner shows how Campus Crusade's ethos really reflects Bright's personality and background (albeit not very successful) within business. Bright has sought to keep his organisation focused on the simple aim of evangelism, soul winning, and his Four Spiritual Laws, a kind of saleman's patter that Bright and his staff have used to initiate conversations about the gospel, has become well-known. Throughout the book, Bright's almost slavish dedication to this evangelistic technique, with its stress on the bottom line of making a decision for Christ, shines through. I'd have liked to have seen a more thorough theological discussion of this in the book, and more reflection on its actual, rather than percieved, success. Grand claims are made about the amount of people who made a decision for Christ through the use of the Four Spiritual Laws, many no doubt genuine, but one has inevitably to wonder! It just sounds too formulaic, too contrived, too tightly packed and too generic. What does emerge though is Bright's own dedication to the task of personal evangelism, and Turner fills his study with instances of Bright going out of his way to witness to people in all sorts of realms of life and introduce them to the claims of Christ.

For a British reader one of the most intirguing aspects of the book has to be Bright's political involvement. From its earliest days in the 1950s Bright saw Campus Crusade as a bulwalk against Communism. Some of the almost hysterical rhetoric of the threat that many Americans felt Communism posed is quite amusing to read from this distance, but the allying of evangelicalism to right-wing, and often very right-wing, politics is more perplexing, even problematic fro this side of the Atlantic. Of course, this link became still closer when Reagan became US president, but its odd that during the Reagan years, Campus Crusade seemed to have entered a period of lull and retrenchment, at precisely the time when evangelicals were reaching public prominence. Jim Wallis, the founder of the Sojourners network appears at regular intervals in the narrative as a kind of sparring partner with Bright from the 1970s onwards. But surely a more incisive reading of the evangelical relationship with Republican politics needs to be more hard-nosed; were figures like Reagan actually using evangelicals like Bright, and Billy Graham too, in a much more cynical way, tapping into the very large numbers of votes that they could swing the ways of Republican presidential candidates? Were Bright and his contemporaries within late twentieth-century American evangelicalism actually just deeply naive in the final analysis?

Campus Crusade seems now to have beeen jolted into life following the lull it entered in the 1980s; in the twenty-first century Campus Crusade had grown massively, partly the result of large-scale immigration into American from south-east Asian evangelicals. It has also become much more integrated within the wider evangelical world and more at ease with American cultural mores, although it still maintains a very conservative stance on gender issues, being a leading advocate of complementarianism, and a strong voice in the anti-abortion anti-gay rights lobby.

Bright's final years struck me as quite sad in some respects. Bright had oppossed the charismatic movement quite vociferously in the 1960s, but mellowed when his son came home speaking in tongues. In his later years, though, Bright hooked up with Benny Hinn, of all people, and became very interested in the whole idea of healing ministry! He was also involved in the Evangelicals and Catholics Together project which speaks of a more encouraging ecumenical spirit, and much to his credit, resisted that other big evangelical failing, trying to hand on his ministry to members of his own family. He seems to have handled his succession very well, something that can't be said of all that many prominent evangelicals!!

Perhaps still more impressive was the way in which he worked at mending relationships with those he had disagreed with during his lifetime, both within Campus Crusade and outside; figures that included Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. So despite my misgivings over the form of evangelicalism represented by Campus Crusade and Bright's politics, I was encouraged by Bright's passion for personal evangelism and his long-standing personal integrity. John Turner has written an admirable volume, very highly recommended for anyone wishing for a good insight into the American evangelical sub-culture.

The 'new' Calvinism in The Times

2009-07-12T21:18:00.004+01:00

Well Calvin's actual 500th birthday was marked by The Times newspaper with a report on the the resurgence of Calvinism in the United States. In a pretty positive review, the report majored on Al Mohler's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and nodded a couple of times to John Piper and Mark Driscoll. Shame they didn't concentrate on these two a bit more really, would have given the report a more human touch!

Apart from a couple of negative comments, which show that same old objections to Calvinism are still going strong as well, its a great review. Click on the link below:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6633558.ece.

Blogging in the name of the Lord

2009-07-08T14:24:00.002+01:00

I've just completed an interview for Guy Davies' blog, Exiled Preacher. Its in his 'Blogging in the name of the Lord' series of interviews with other evangelical bloggers.

There's quite a bit about my personal background in it, but most of it is about my views on a number of issues relating to the way evangelicals, especially reformed evangelicals, write about history. Some of my answers are intentionally provocative, particularly over the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, simplistic non-historical understandings of revival and the prevalence of fundamentalism among evangelicals. The big thing I was trying to get across is that history is not theology, and that our understanding of history must be driven by the evidence that we are able to amass, not our theological predilictions of what stripe they might be! Click on the link here to read it: http://exiledpreacher.blogspot.com/2009/07/blogging-in-name-of-lord-david-ceri.html.

Writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing . . .!

2009-07-03T16:00:00.004+01:00

Summer has well and truly reached Aberystwyth, the students are long gone, the campus is quiet, and I've a long list of things to finish writing before September comes around and they all come back again!

First up is finishing off the sections I'm writing for my latest book project Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735-1811 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010). This is intended to be a co-authored work, my other two authors are Boyd Schlenther and Eryn White. I'm writing the opening section, taking the narrative of early Calvinistic Methodism up to 1750. Thankfully I wrote most of it during my sabbatical late last year, just one further chapter to finish off. We've a deadline of the end of the summer (when is that exactly?) to get the completed typescript off to the publishers; most of it is ready, but the big edit to make sure it all fits together is still to come!

Today I've been writing about John Cennick's leadership of Calvinistic Methodism in London, a sad story really since his personal sanctity and other-worldliness made him temperamentally unsuited to lead such an argumentative bunch as the London Calvinists. After presiding over a few more minor secessions, he lost the ocnfidence of Howel Harris, his co-leader of English Calvinistic Methodism, and soon decamped to the rather more serene lifestyle on offer among the Moravians, not before he had taken over 400 people from Whitefield's London Tabernacle with him! He ended up in Ulster planting a number of Moravian churches in the province - the nice thing about this fact being that it was in the church he founded at Gracehill near Ballymena, that my wife, Clare, and I were married - 13 years ago next month!!

More Marilynne Robinson

2009-07-02T21:36:00.002+01:00

I've been engrossed in Marilynne Robinson's books for the last couple of weeks. In an earlier post I talked about Gilead; after finishing it I tried her The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (2005); although not fiction and despite being a little more uneven, it had some real high points, especially those chapters which dealt with Calvin and Calvinism. Calvin is receiving a lot of attention in the press at the minute, given the 500th anniversary of his birth, even featuring on the BBC website today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8129510.stm), replete, of course, with the usual banal stereotypes about Calvin, Geneva and predestination! This is where Robinson on Calvin is so good; she's read lots of the most recent scholarship, and gives a more balanced nuanced account of Calvin and Calvinism, including the Puritans also. On the whole issue of the repressiveness of sixteenth-century Genevan society under Clavin she writes:

'Cauvin . . . did attempt to have all Genevans sign a statement of belief, with the proclaimed but unenforced penalty of banishment from the city for those who refused. On the other hand, when the people of Geneva decided this demand was unacceptable . . . they could and did banish Cauvin and his friends from the city. Severity so liable to correction hardly deserves the name (The Death of Adam, pp. 198-9).

Much more of this nature can be found in the pages of The Death of Adam. Ideal reading for the weekend of the anniversary of Calvin's birth!

That led me on to read Robinson's latest novel, Home (2008). In some ways a companion volume to Gilead, although you don't necessarily need to have read Gilead to appreciate it, the central characters of Home are Jack Boughton and his sister, Glory, two of the children of Rev Boughton, the patriarchal Presbyterian minister, who was a more peripheral figure in Gilead. Jack is the black sheep of the family, having become an alcoholic and left his black wife and child behind, but is still very much his father's favourite. Glory also has her own demons and the book is the story of their return home to look after their dying father, as they struggle with his faith and his expections of them. Like Gilead its written with subtilty and beauty, and Robinson writes about the tensions between Jack, Glory and their father with compelling insight. Its an unbelievably sad and poignant book, but far from depressing! I can't recommend Home highly enough; without doubt one of the must read books of this year - easily available now in every bookshop in the land following its scooping the recent Orange Prize for fiction!!

To all you Dads out there!

2009-06-22T09:38:00.003+01:00

Mark Driscoll has just published a short book for all Dad's, Pastor Dad, sort of a Father's Day gift!! Click here to read it online (http://bit.ly/tENkq). Its outstanding - and has a wealth of useful theology and advice about being a good biblical Father. Essential reading for all Grandads, Dads, soon-to-be Dads, thinking-about-being a Dad, and wanna-be Dads - not to mention all those terrified-to-be Dads too!!!

The final Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism conference

2009-06-19T21:08:00.006+01:00

This past week I've been in London at the final Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism symposium, this time at the very plush Royal Foundation of St Katherine in not quite so sallubrious east London! This time we were thinking about contemporary expressions of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism.

We kicked off with a super session from Brian Stanley, the newly appointed Professor of Global Christianity in Edinburgh. He took issue with Rob Warner's thesis (see his Reinventing English Evangelicalism, 1966-2001 (Paternoster, 2007) that there was a tangible rightwards shift in British evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century, and painted a much more complex picture. He divided the period into three phases, a more fundamentalistic post war phase; a second phase corresponding to the long 1960s, which saw the broadening of evangelical horizons, particularly among Anglican evangelicals, and a third phase down to the present which has seen the proliferation of kinds of evangelicalism, making simple generalisations and definitions much more difficult. Unsurprisingly, his paper included a welcome global perspective, showing how it was often influences from outside Britain, Billy Graham, the East African revival, gobal ecumenism, which proved key. His final volume in the IVP History of Evangelicalism series is eagerly anticipated.

We then had two shorter papers; one on the influence of the American post-modern theologian Stanley Grenz, the second an intriguing oral history study of attitudes to scriptures in two contrasting anonymous evangelical congregations.

Our evening session was led by Mark Noll, who provided us with an extremely rich paper comparing British and American Evangelicalism since World War II. Perhaps his biggest insight was his comment that prior to WWII most evangelicals were primarily concerned with maintaining tradition, while in the post war decades the emphasis shifted toward engaging the culture, led by an entreprenurial Evangelicalism, no longer hung-up on some of the same issues as its Fundamentalist forebears. Present day evangelicals, almost universally attempt a deliberate adaptation to the norms of contemporary culture. Noll argued that its best that we jettison the word fundamentalism altogether, and suggested that to talk of British fundamentalism was 'ridiculous'!

For me the highlight of the conference was Alister Chapman's paper on John Stott; in a beautifully crafted paper he charted Stott's development from being an out and out Fundamentalist at Cambridge in the 1950s, through his broadening sympathies during the 1960s, and his embrace, not openly I guess, of a much more open evangelical stance by the 1990s.

Slightly disappointing was Sebastian Fath's paper on the Isle of Lewis, probably the most Christian part of western Europe. Based on his own extensive field work, Fath painted a picture of the island as the last bastion of Protestant Fundamentalism, but I didn't really think that he grappled sufficiently with the islands' Calvinist identity. Aren't evangelicals on Lewis really much older school Calvinists, keen to defend a very different Calvinist religious hegemony? The real nature of the 1950s Lewis revival might also have been explored a bit more, particuarly the appeal of the Arminian Duncan Campbell!

All in all this was an excellent gathering; as always it was great to renew friendships again. There's one further project meeting in London during December which will be a one day conference specifically for a wider public audience. The keynote speaker will be Alister McGrath, who'll be talking about evangelicals, fundamentalists and science. I'll advertise more details in due course.

Fundamentalism . . . well and truly live and kicking!!

2009-06-18T20:37:00.004+01:00

Just read this highly entertaining critique of the New Calvinism in the United States. Its by Peter Masters, the pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London - proof, if any were needed, that Fundamentalism is alive and in very rude health in Britain today!!

Click on the link below: http://www.metropolitantabernacle.org/?page=articles&id=13

All joking aside - its actually quite sad really, tragic even!

Revival, Renewal and the Holy Spirit

2009-06-15T21:27:00.003+01:00

Just received a copy of Dyfed Wyn Roberts (ed.), Revival, Renewal and the Holy Spirit (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009) this morning. The book contains many of the papers delivered at conference held in Bangor in 2004 to commemorate the centenary of the 1904/5 Welsh revival. So its taken a while to appear, but it looks a really worthwhile volume in the end. I've a chapter in it on a relatively minor figure in the evangelical revival, John Lewis, who was the editor of the Calvinistic Methodist periodical, The Weekly History. I wrote it so long ago its hard to remember exactly what's in it now, but I think I talk about the role of media and communication in spreading religious revivals. There's lots of other intersting stuff in it too; lots on 1904 of course, including a really interesting evaluation of the relationship between Evan Roberts and Jessie Penn Lewis, and an intriguing paper by John Harvey that explores the relationship between the revival and the growth of spiritualism in Wales at the same time. There's plenty more too including keynote papers by David Bebbington and Mark Noll, and a valuable discussion of some of the reasons for the rapid decline in the revival by the well-known historian of pentecostalism, William Kay. All highly recommended!

The long goodbye!

2009-06-12T21:15:00.012+01:00

Well this week is a really sad week I'm afraid. One of my oldest friends Leith Haarhoff and his family are emigrating to New Zealand, so its a week of goodbyes! Alwyn Owen, Leith and myself had our last supper, at Gwesty Cymru in Aberystwyth earlier in the week, a lovely if bittersweet evening, reminiscing and thanking God for the ways in which we've seen Him working in one anothers' lives over the last few years! Today Leith and I had our final round of golf at Capel Bangor. We've been playing for a few years, and I think we can see an improvement, well sometimes at least! Leith won today - my late comeback wasn't enough to stave off defeat in the end! There's always next time - where will that be though, Wales, New Zealand, or maybe somewhere in between - how does Seattle sound? Do you think Mark Driscoll is into golf - Clare will caddy if that's the case!! I took a couple of videos to remember the day - so, Leith, when your playing golf in the southern hemisphere sun, think of me in Wales playing, if I can find another poor unfortunate golf partner, in the leaden grey summer skies of mid Wales!

They say you can tell a lot about a man by his golf swing - I've no idea what these two say about us!!!

So thank you Leith for being a terrific friend - you've modelled humble, self-effacing and consistent discipleship of Jesus to me, and my life has been enriched by your example. So I'm really sorry to see you go - and go so far away as well!!

'And now, I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give an inheritance among all those who are sanctified' (Acts 20:32).

I need a break from Dostoevsky!!

2009-06-03T11:49:00.009+01:00

Well this week is a quiet week ensconsed in the office ploughing through piles of exam scripts that need marking - not much to go now at least! Last night was the sixth session of my church history course for the Aberystwyth Academy of Christian Discipleship; we did the whole of the Reformation in about two hours! All but one of the group turned up, so we were seven in all and had a great time thinking about history and theology and trying to relate it to ourselves and church today. They're a great group, really appreciative and an absolute pleasure to serve in this way!

Having ploughed through about 350 pages of The Karamazov Brothers, I thought I needed to read something different before tackling the second half.

Last week in Geneva I discovered the books of Marilynne Robinson; she was one of the speakers at the conference, but I unfortunately missed her paper, but lots of my friends were raving about her books and amazed that I hadn't read any of them. So once I got home I picked up a copy of Gilead (2005), which everybody said was her best book, and I have to say its an amazingly beautiful book. I'm not sure I've ever read anything quite like it.

Its central character is the Revd John Ames, and the book is basically a family history in the form of a letter which he writes to his young son in 1956 as he is dying. Its set in Iowa in the American Mid-West, and is basically an account of his ministry and life, and includes much also about his grandfather, an old-fashioned fire and brimstone preacher, who faught in the American civil war. Its mostly about ideas and theology, particularly how Ames moves away from evangelical religion to embrace more liberal pacificistic ideas, but also as much about how the three generations of the family rubbed along with each other, maintaining an uneasy truce.

I can't recommend it highly enough, and I'd be really interested to hear anyone else's thoughts on Robinson's books. Just got to get her latest novel Home (2008), now that I'm hooked!

My pilgrimage to Geneva

2009-05-28T19:14:00.015+01:00

Apparently, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was all the rage for Welsh Calvinistic Methodist ministers to make the pilgrimage to Geneva, the most famous of whom, Owen M. Edwards, published an account of the trip O'r Bala i Geneva (1889) which was widely read in Wales. So I felt as though I was following in the footsteps of my forefathers this last few days as I attended the 'Calvin and his Influence, 1509-2009' conference in the Swiss city. Not having been to Geneva before, nothing quite prepares you for the stunning view of Lake Geneva surrounded by the towering snow-capped peaks of the Alps from 20,000 or so feet up!

The old city of Geneva, perched on the hill looking over the lake is quite something too. Although much has changed in the 450 or so years since Calvin lived there, there's enough to give a real sense of what the city must have been like in the mid sixteenth century. There's a plaque to mark the spot where Calvin's house once stood, although the building currently on the site is only a mere 300 odd years old! St Peter's Cathedral (see picture above) is very impressive, although the facade is an addition from Calvin's day. And the Reformation Wall of course, commemorating Calvin, John Knox, Theodore Beza and Guillame Farel, is as impressive as the pictures suggest.

The conference was great too, although I missed the two highlights - Diarmaid MacCulloch's opening paper and David Bebbington's closing paper on the reception of Calvin in Britian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The session I'd organised with Densil Morgan and Robert Pope from Bangor was on Tuesday morning. Although our audience was a bit thin, a combination of the Welsh subject matter I suppose, ten simulataneous parallel sessions for delegates to choose from and speaking at 8:30 in the morning, the session went really well. Densil gave an overview of the history and development of Calvinism in Wales from 1590, when the first recorded use of the term Calvinism occurred, and 1909. I followed with my paper on the Calvinism of the early Welsh Methodists and Robert concluded with a paper on Calvinism in early twentieth century Wales, focussing in the main on J. Cynddylan Jones. Personally, I was really pleased with how my paper went, and had some really useful questions which gave me plenty of leads to follow when I write up the paper for the planned special issue of the Welsh Journal of Relgious History.

Of the other papers I heard William Naphy from Aberdeen was probably the best, particularly his account of the ecclesisatical and political structures put in place by Calvin in sixteenth-century Geneva. The most memorable comment being that while Geneva was certainly no democracy, it was a massive step forward for the times, and a major step towards the kind of representative government we take for granted. The other highlight, though for different reasons, was Alan Clifford's paper on Calvin and John Wesley. According to Clifford, Calvin was really an Amyraldian, as was Wesley, which in effect means that Wesley was a Calvinist. You had to be there!!

But maybe the real highlight of the whole three days was seeing Densil just evading a fine from a very serious looking Swiss bus conductor at 11 o'clock at night - but that's another story . . . . !!

Geneva here we come!

2009-05-22T19:37:00.006+01:00

Well the paper is written for the Calvin fest; I don't usually leave writing so late, but the pressure of finishing teaching and mountains of marking gave me no choice in the end. Thankfully, I only had to write a short piece, enough for 20 or 25 minutes speaking time, although sometimes its harder boiling down what you want to say to the barebones.

I think the paper has turned out alright, although I didn't really have enough time to do the research I really intended. I think it does what I intended, shows how Harris and Whitefield both adopted moderate Calvinist positions in the later 1730s, and then defended them in controversy with John Wesley in 1741. Anyway, it'll be published along with the papers of Densil Morgan and Robert Pope, my co-panellists, in a special Calvin commemorative issue of the Journal of Welsh Religious History in due course, so I should have chance to do a fair bit more work on it.

I'll blog about the conference when I get back next week - when I've worked my through the mountain of exam papers that'll be waiting for me once I'm back that is!!

Just trying to work out how Calvinist Welsh Calvinistic Methodism actually was!

2009-05-16T19:24:00.006+01:00

Well, the Calvin-fest in Geneva is little more than a week away now, and I'm busy trying to get my paper written. I've organised a conference panel on Calvin's influence in Welsh Nonconformity, with Densil Morgan and Robert Pope from Bangor contributing alongside me, David Bebbington kindly having agreed to chair and lead the responses to us.

I think I've pretty much worked out what I'm trying to say. Basically, I've been trying to think about the nature of the Calvinism espoused by Howel Harris and his fellow Welsh Methodists. Much of the literature doesn't really deal with this question, assuming Calvinism to be a pretty monolitic body of thought, or that Harris and the Welsh Methodists' soul-winning instincts often overrode their rather stultifying theological presuppositions. I think that's actually to mis-understand the nature of their theology. I'm going to try and argue that Harris, in particular, championed a moderate form of evangelical Calvinism, that didn't get involved in the intricacies of speculative predestinarian theology and that was allied to a strong evangelistic impulse.

At the moment, at least, I've amassed evidence from three areas of Harris' early life and career in support of this thesis; from his conversion and early theological development, paying particular attention to the authors he read regularly; fsecondly rom his early friends and contacts, particularly George Whitefield, and some Welsh Baptist ministers who had passed through the Bristol Baptist Academy. Then finally from first Calvinist/Arminian controversy, by which time Harris and Whitefield's moderate theology was settled and crystal clear, thrown into starker relief by John Wesley's misunderstandings and mis-representations. Well, just got to write it all up now!!

John Piper on John 3:16 - the most famous verse in the Bible!

2009-05-12T22:14:00.003+01:00

I listened to these two sermons by John Piper today on John 3:16 -

'For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes on him will not perish but have everlasting life'.

They're magnificent - click on the link below:

http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/BySeries/86/3874_God_So_Loved_the_World_Part_1/

Dostoevsky . . . will I ever finish this book!

2009-05-11T20:43:00.002+01:00

Well I seem to have been coming across references to Dostoevsky's books in so many things that I've been reading lately that I thought I'd give him a go!

I'm not usually a big reader of novels, but I'm 60 pages into The Karamazov Brothers . . . just another 900 or so to go then! At least I'm getting an education in all things Russian!!

Alister McGrath in Aberystwyth . . . and some thoughts on science and creation too!!

2009-05-08T14:56:00.005+01:00

Apologies for the inactivity on the blogging front over the last week or so - I'm practically done with all the marking now, so I should have slightly more time to devote to the blogspot! Well the Alister McGrath lecture I advertised here a couple of weeks ago took place on Thursday. He spoke to a packed lecture theatre for about fifty minutes, and fielded some questions for about twenty minutes or half an hour or so. Characteristically, he spoke without notes for the whole lecture which was one of the most impressive features of the whole event for me; throughout his tone and manner was both generous, engaging and entirely non-confrontational, something that contrasted markedly with the often aggresive style of Richard Dawkins, with whom he engaged at some length in the lecture. Its difficult to give a full account of the lecture; if anything his title 'Darwin and the Divine' was slightly misleading since the lecture ended up being about Dawkins and the Divine - much of what he said was doubtless taken from his excellent, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (2007). Unlike most university lectures too, this one was unashamedly popular in tone, clearly intended to engage a public well beyond the ivory tower of academia!

There's much that I could comment on, but not being a scientist I'll resist the temptation to venture into those areas of the lecture that dealt primarily with biology, although I think some of McGrath's comments on the limitations of science, or the limits of the questions that science can answer was very appropriate given the hegemony that scientific thought still seems to occupy in our culture!

For me the most intriguing part of the lecture was the last ten or fifteen minutes when he began to talk about how we should interpret the early chapters of the book of Genesis. McGrath's basic assumption was that evolution can be used to support an atheistic, but it is also possible to make evolution thoroughly theistic. Here he drew, in particular, on Augustine's theology of creation which, McGrath argued, stressed five points: God created the world in an instant: creation included embedded causalities that evolved at a later stage; evolution takes place within God's providential guidance; the original created order was not static and species don't change - he wondered whether Augustine would have modified his views on the last in the light of more recent scietific advances. I would have liked to have heard much more on this, for him to have developed these points, since Augustine, writing as early as the fourth century, clearly didn't interpret Genesis 1 in a literal sense. But this wans't the place for a theological lecture.

Of course modern creationism is a pretty recently development, Ronald Numbers', The Creationists (1993), shows this superbly, but I'm always slightly concerned at the line of reasoning that assumes that the early chapters of Genesis are myth, even if the story that they tell, that underlies them, might be true. It seems the standard 'respectable' evangelical position to argue that we can accept evolution if we do some fancy hermeneutical work with the early chapters of Genesis first! I'm not so sure. Of course there'll be no conflict between science and religion if our religion has been shorn of key biblical concepts first. But if we take this line are we being faithful to Scripture and God's self-revelation. Is there a danger that we as evangelicals are so keen to get academic respectability, or not to appear as anti-diluvian, that we trim away what we think are the rough edges of our faith?

Now of course, I'm not advocating that we all become rabid Fundamentalist six-day creationists, but maybe we need to start with our exesigesis of Genesis, develop a coherent biblical theology of creation that does justice to what all of the Bible says about creation, and then turn to science. The oft-quoted aphorism that God has two books, Scripture and nature, is potentially misleading here, surely the specific revelation in Scripture takes precedence over the general revelation in nature and creation? They are not equal in usefulness.

Well, that enough thinking aloud for one night, I've gone far enough beyond what McGrath said in his lecture . . .!

Teaching, marking, teaching, marking . . . !

2009-04-30T14:26:00.002+01:00

Apologies for the inactivity on the blogging front for the last week or so; its going to be quiet for the next 10 days or so as well, I'm afraid.

Its the busiest time of the academic year at the minute, finishing off teaching, wading through tons of marking etc etc!! Can just about see the light at the end of the tunnel now though . . .

Alister McGrath in Aberystwyth

2009-04-25T22:37:00.006+01:00

Professor Alister McGrath of King's College, London, will be giving a public lecture in Aberystwyth next week. The title of his lecture will be:

'Darwin and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Religious Belief'

This will a rare opportunity to listen to one of today's most important and influential Christian thinkers. He's the author of many important books, and one of the most effective Christian apologists, having debated publicly with Richard Dawkins on a number of occasions. The lecture will be held at 7pm on Thursday, May 7 in the Old Hall, Old College, Aberystwyth.

Reflections on Francis Schaeffer

2009-04-24T15:33:00.006+01:00

There's been a resurgence of interest over the past few years in the life and contribution of Francis Schaeffer to Evangelicalism on both sides of the Atlantic. While, I don't suppose that Schaeffer's writings are devoured by keen evangelical undergraduates the way they were twenty or thirty years ago, many Christian academics gladly acknowledge his call for joined-up thinking about the development of a Christian mind and worldview at any early stage in their intellectual and spiritual development.

The recent interest has come about in large part as a response to Frank Schaeffer, Francis' son's autobiography, Crazy for God: How I Grew up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to take it all (or almost all) of it back (2007). Rivaling the Puritans penchant for long titles, Crazy for God is the painful account of Frank's engagement from Evangelicalism, and as such stands in a long line of evangelical de-conversion narratives (see David Hempton's excellent recent Evangelical Disenchantment: 9 Portraits of Faith and Doubt (2008) for more). Frank's damning assessment of the life and spirituality of his mother and father reads almost like tabloid journalism at times, and its hard not to feel slightly voyeuristic as revelation upon revelation about life at L'Abri spills forth from Frank's pen.

Whether in response or not, two more detailed biographies of Francis Schaeffer have recently appeared. Colin Duriez's, Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (Leicester: IVP, 2008) is, as its title suggests, a much more sympathetic portrayal that undoubtedly attempts to repair the damage done by Crazy for God.

Much better and more scholarly is Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). Hankins argues that Schaeffer's career had three phases; he set out as a Fundamentalist pastor, a persona ameliorated by his years in Switzerland, only to re-emerge when he became a champion of more militant American Evangelicalism during the 1970s. Hankin's study is much more than a straightforward biography though. Some of the central chapters attempt to analyse his writings, focussing particularly on the sophistication of Schaeffer's view of the history of Western philosophy. Here Hankins is pretty critical, pointing out that Schaeffer rarely read deeply, but gleaned his material from magazines and religious periodicals. He was one for the big picture, which while still having some element of truth about it, needs to be heavily nuanced by more recent scholarship. In many ways Schaeffer's Escape from Reason now needs to be read in conjunction with something like Charles Taylor's, A Secular Age (2007) for one to get a fuller and more complete picture of the decline of Christianity and the rise of secular modernity. Importantly, Hankins also draws attention to the apparent contradiction between Schaeffer's criticism of the rise of rationalism and modernity, while he himself made use of rational argumentation to defend the Christian worlview. Of course, the emergence of postmodern epistemology has subsequent made Schaeffer methodology seem slightly out-moded.

There's much in Hankins's book that deserves comment, but for me, as an historian, the most interesting part was the second half of chapter 8 in which he discusses Schaeffer's interaction with two of America's most influential evangelical historians, George Marsden and Mark Noll. By the 1970s Schaeffer had become committed to the political programme of what we now know as the Religious Right, and argued repeatedly for the Christian foundation of the American constitution. Both Noll and Marsden, in a long and extensive correpsondence, attempted to reason with Schaeffer, on the basis of their own detailed historical work, that there was little obvious evangelical input in the Constitution of the United States, that the concept of a Christian America in the eighteenth century was in fact a myth. Schaeffer accused them of letting their commitment to the writing of history stand in the way of their supposedly higher calling of defending the Christian foundations of America. Schaeffer, by now the typical Fundamentalist was demonstrating his hostility to scholarship, even scholarship informed by a Christian worldview.

Those who attempt to write history within the academy, and attempt to do so without compromising commitment to Christ, will find much in these pages. Those who've had one of their books published in the pages of a periodical like The Banner of Truth will know all too well that the suspicion of academic history runs deep in contemprary British evangelicalism as well. As evangelical historians our loyalty should be to the truth of history, not to the defence of any perceived evangelical golden age in the past, or favourite saint from the pages of Church history. If this quest for truth, and use of all of the tools that modern scholarship has to offer, means that there will be a necessary debunking of many of the historical myths loved by evangelicals, then surely we should have nothing to fear. In this, I guess, Schaeffer, or really Hankins I suppose, has much to teach us!

Thinking about Fundamentalists!

2009-04-23T21:02:00.015+01:00

I was in Stirling for the early part of the week at the third meeting of the Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism network, which was great. The core group of these meetings has remained the same for the past year or so and we've been slowly inching our way towards a working definition of Fundamentalism. This time we focussed on more contemporary expressions of Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, or at least on the post 1945 period. Unfortunately one speaker pulled out who was due to speak on Fundamentalism and the Northern Ireland peace process during the last twenty years which was a great pity since Ulster probably has the most visible Fundamentalist communities in Britain, and I'm not just thinking about Ian Paisley!

We had five keynote speakers, but I had to miss the final session by Harriet Harris, because of the way the train timetables worked out for me to get back to Aberystwyth. This was really disappointing given that her Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (2nd. edn., 2008) is the most up to date and, with her preference for a strictly hermeneutical definition of both groups, probably controversial work on Fundamentalism in Britain and Ireland.

Our first paper was by Callum Brown, whose brilliant The Death of Christian Britain (2000) has brought him to the attention of many outside of academia. He focussed on the upsurge in conservative Christianity in 1960s Britain, concentrating in the main on five individuals, Billy Graham, Peter Howard, Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge and Lord Longford, not all whom had the strongest links to British evangelicalism it must be said, but each gained public prominance for their opposition to the permissive society of the 1960s, indeed more prominence than any mainstream evangelicals. I was particularly struck by this contrast, and the reluctance of many evangelicals to get involved in public campaigning in the 1960s, but this was before the Lausanne Congress (1974), and before John Stott's re-awakening of the social conscience of evangelicals. Especially revealing were comments from the floor about Martyn Lloyd Jones' coolness toward the anti-abortion movement, indicative perhaps of the falsely pietistic approach of many evangelicals in the 1960s.

Ian Randall focussed our attention on the Billy Graham crusades of the 1950s and 1960s arguing that Graham began to question his Fundamentalism through contact with some key British evangelicals. Randall argued that it was his organisation of the British crusades, in particular, that led Graham to take a more generous views of the theological positions of some of his supporters who did not share his conservative evangelical opinions. This led to a fruitful discussion about whether the equating of evangelicalism with Christianity and vice versa, the belief that only evangelicals were genuine Christians, should be regarded as a key element of Fundamentalism.

In many ways Andrew Atherstone's paper on the Keele congress of 1967 dovetailed neatly with this, since he argued that the most significant thing about the Keele meetings was not the re-engagement of Anglican evangelicals with the structures of the Church of England, but the attitudinal change or the mood swing that it represented. From the perspective of my own work on evangelical repositioning in Wales during the 1960s what was interesting about this paper was a short piece about Keele representing the turning away of evangelical Anglicans from any possibility of pan-evangelical unity, of the kind that Martyn Lloyd Jones had been advocating. Maybe Keele represented a missed opportunity for British evangelicalism, that is only now being realised once more?

The final paper I heard was from Derek Tidball, on the emergence of Free Methodism in the north-west of England during the 1970s. Although a secession from Methodism, Tidball argued that the Free Methodists did not display the kind of beligerent secessionism characteristic of many Fundamentalists, and do not therefore fit the Fundamentalist label.

The three conferences which we've had so far have all, to some extent or other, grappled with the problem of defining Fundamentalism, or at least distinguishing it from Evangelicalism more generally. It may be that this is a futile task, and what would be more useful would be to talk in terms of a spectrum on the left of which might be more liberal forms of evangelicalism and on the right outright Fundamentalism, with many gradations and stopping off points along the way!

We'll that's the end of my month of galivanting around the country. Back to a hectic few weeks of teaching duties now before thinking about the next conference, the Calvin-fest in Geneva at the end of May.

Christianity and History Forum, Leamington Spa (12-17 April 2009)

2009-04-18T21:23:00.006+01:00

I've been away most of the second half of the week at the bi-annual conference of the Chrstianity and History Forum at Offa House near Leamington Spa. I've been a member of the society for about a decade now, and this was my third conference. The forum brings together Christian historians, so the feel of the conference tends to be fairly unique; apart from each day beginning and ending with reading the Bible and prayer, it gives plenty of opportunity for reflection on how we relate our faith to our historical work, and how we can accomodate belief in a providental God active in the historical process with the often competing demands of academic history. As ever it was great to meet up with old friends and meet plenty of new ones also. Thankfully, this year I didn't have to present a paper, but took along two of my graduate students, Chris Adams and Chris Smith who both presented their first conference papers. Both did really well and got to meet plenty of new people and get lots of feedback on their work which they greatly appreciated! This year's conference was the largest for some years, and was particularly blessed with a larger number of papers from current doctoral students. As these were in parallel sessions, I didn't get to hear them all but really enjoyed the session on various aspects of early modern Protestantism. There were three plenary sessions, two of which had a literary slant; Elizabeth Clarke, from Warwick, spoke on the early modern uses of the Song of Songs which was excellent, and remarkable for its demonstration of the extent to which the Puritans often went in their interpretation of the book to avoid talking about sex! David Bebbington gave a paper on another of his case studies from his forthcoming book on religious revivals. He focussed on a series of revivals in a couple of remote fishing communities in Nova Scotia, Canada, during 1880. He analysed them in forensic detail as usual, arguing that we should really be studying religious revivals from the ground up to properly understand their internal dynamics. For me though the events described by David in this case study seemed to more closely approximate to an evangelisitc campaign than a more widespread religious revival, but I guess this has much to do with how one uses the term revival. I wished that I'd asked a question following the paper about how David selects his case studies and about the nuts and bolts of his methodology. There's always next time . . .! A new feature this year were two roundtable discussions on a couple of important newly published books. The second of these was on Mark Noll's, God and Race in American Politics (2008), particularly opportune, of course, with the beginning of the Obama presidency just a few months ago. Most useful, for me at least, was the first discussion on Charles Taylor's mamoth 800 page, A Secular Age (2007). I was glad to find that I wasn't the only one who struggled to read it all, but the discussion at least inspired me to pick it up again and carry on where I left off a few months ago - somewhere around page 200 I think it was!! Well, its off to Stirling on Monday for a two day workshop on expressions of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in Britain between the 1950s and the present day. I'll blog about it when I get back later in the week.

Church History module at Aberystwyth Academy of Christian Discipleship

2009-04-14T20:56:00.006+01:00

I'll be teaching a 10 week course on the history of the Christian Church as part of the Aberystwyth Academy of Christian Discipleship, based at St Michaels Church, Aberystwyth. The course will give a brief outline of the main highlights in the 2000 year history of the church; in the first session we'll look at why history should be important to Christians, and we'll then go on to look at themes such as the Early Church Fathers, Augustine, St Benedict and Monasticism, the Reformation, the emergence of Evangelicalism in the eighteneth century and the rise of the global Christianity in the twentieth cenury. Those interested in following the module, or just coming along to some individual sessions will find more details here: http://christiandiscipleship.co.uk/

Interview with Keith Getty - author of 'In Christ Alone'

2009-04-14T18:47:00.002+01:00

Just watched this great interview with Keith Getty, the co-author with Stuart Townend of In Christ Alone, which is just the best known of a growing collection of fantastic new hymns. In one superb section here he talks about the role hymns should and could play in teaching theology within the local church setting. To watch the whole video of the interview, click below: adrianwarnock.com: Interview With Keith Getty - Co-Writer Of In Christ Alone

Tom Wright on Jesus' resurrection in 'The Times' today

2009-04-11T22:31:00.004+01:00

Was delighted to read Tom Wright's declaration of the reality of Jesus' resurection in The Times today (Saturday 11 April 2009). Here's just a brief taster: 'Easter was the pilot project. What God did for Jesus that explosive morning is what He intends to do for the whole creation. We who live in the interval between Jesus' Resurrection and the final rescue and transformation of the whole world are called to be new-creation people here and now. That is the hidden meaning of the greatest festival Christians have'.

Thinking aloud about Rob Bell . . .

2009-04-09T23:08:00.008+01:00

Just been reading some of Rob Bell's books in the last couple of weeks, after the clamour of people telling me I should read Velvet Elvis was too much to take any longer and I caved in! I guess Bell provokes one of two responses; lots find him unnerving and think he's one of the more dangerous voices in contemporary evangelicalism; others think that he's nothing short of visionary, re-defining Christianity for the postmodern twenty-first century! I must confess having read Velvet Elvis (2005) and Jesus wants to Save Christians (2008) to being ever so slightly underwhelmed. OK, his books are imaginatively packaged, with their colourfully interleaved pages and Bell's use of short paragraphs and even shorter sentences, they certainly tap-into the contemporary preference for soundbites and instnataneous modes of communication. Before starting Velvet Elvis I'd been forewarned about Bell's two most obviously provocative statements: the one about the hypothetical scenario in which Christians discover that finding the Virgin birth of Jesus wasn't true (p. 26), and the other one about 'Hell being full of forgiven people God loves' (p. 146). To be honest, I'm not sure what he really means by the second statement. Any ideas? As to the first though, this seems to me to be typical of Bell. Clearly being careful not to give the impression that he thinks that the Virgin Birth might be a myth, Bell wonders alound whether it would actually make any difference if belief in the Virgin Birth was jettisoned. Now of course, Bell's aversion to foundationalism or propositional revelation should come as no surprise, since he's trying to recast Christianity in post-modern terms. More worrying to me is his underlying argument that doctrine divides and restricts, doctrines being like bricks that hem people in and keep others out, rather than like a trampoline which gives and adjusts to different circumstances. But doesn't Paul talk about Jesus being our foundation, what's a foundation made of if its not concrete or brick? While I'd want to affirm that the gospel must be presented in terms of narrative, that narrative has to be God cosmic work of redemption, reconciling people to himself and the regenerating of his creation, not the story of my existential engagement with Scripture. Personally, I can't see how you can be a Christian and be unconcerned about doctrine, after all you only have to say the word 'God', and straightaway you've made a theological statement! What do you mean by God? How do you know anything about him? In the end Bell's hermeneutic, seems to owe more to some kind of social Darwinism than the teachings of Jesus. For me the most compelling part of Velvet Elvis was chapter 4, where Bell speaks about his own personal spiritual journey. His argument about Christianity being about more than forgiveness of one's sins, that 'salvation is now' (p. 109), already begun in this present life, rather than at some future time, was the most persuasive part of the book. While I wouldn't want to go as far as Bell, who seems to be suggesting that all Christians should sign up for a programme of therapy or counselling as soon as possible if they want to find inner healing, his call for the Church to recapture the full-orbed nature and extent of the atonement, should be taken very seriously. In this he seems to me to be echoing N. T. Wright, who's new book Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision (2009), similarily argues for a much more comprehensive understanding of the doctrine of justifiation. Many will find it difficult to divorce Bell from his Emergent bed-fellows of course; I guess you can tell much by the company a man keeps! The relative ease with which Bell subverts traditional expressions of Christianity must be a very real concern. Bell's method of interpreting Scripture clearly has the potential to cause havoc, especially among those who buy into the whole re-packaging Christian for postmoderns thing! One wonders whether the majority of the people attracted to Bell's gospel are really those who've become dissilusioned with their evangelical upbringing, rather than those outside the Church to begin with. Just some random thoughts really last thing at night . . .!

Theological historians - what a great idea!

2009-04-09T21:52:00.003+01:00

Just read a great blog entry by Jon Yeager on what it means to be a theological historian. Personally, I've always struggled to find a description that best captures what I do, not really being an historian of theology, and not really entirely happy being known as a social historian of religion. Will my colleagues know what I'm talking about if I call myself a theological historian though? All the same the best practicioners of the art, Noll, Bebbington etc etc, set a very high standard to emulate! See: http://esrh.blogspot.com/.

Mark Driscoll

2009-04-08T20:42:00.005+01:00

I've been a massive Mark Driscoll fan for the last six months or so. He's one of the pastors at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, perhaps one of the fastest growing churches in America at the present time. His preaching combines an infectious passion for Jesus, a committment to reformed theology, frighteningly searching application and a bang-up-to-date style of communication.

For those who've not heard him before, he's currently preaching a series of sermons on 1 & 2 Peter, called 'Trial: 8 witnesses from 1&2 Peter'. Last Sunday's sermon called 'Suffering to Learn: 1 Peter 3, 17-22' is as good a place as any to start. I tried to upload it here, but the technology is beyond me this early in my blogging career! Anyway, there's a great section in it on the perspicuity of Scripture towards the beginning, and another on the unrighteousness of Noah towards the end!

He's got tons more more material available at http://www.marshillchurch.org/. All sermon downloads are free of charge. No doubt I'll be blogging plenty about his sermons as I listen to them!

A new publication

2009-04-07T14:28:00.003+01:00

I've just published a chapter in the following book: Mark Smith (ed.), British Evangelical Identities Past and Present: Aspects of the History and Sociology of Evangelicalism in Britain and Ireland (Milton Keynes: Authentic Media, 2009). My chapter, entitled 'Methodism and the Origins of Evangelical in Wales, 1735-62', attempts to account for the beginnings of evangelicalism in Wales in the mid eighteenth century. It tries to argue against those who tend to interpret the Welsh Methodist Revival in more evolutionary terms, stressing its discontinutity with previous expressions of Protestantism in Wales and its place in the emerging evangelical movement in the mid eighteenth century British Atlantic world.

There's lots of other really useful stuff in the book too, including much on contemprary British evangelicalism. Available from: http://www.authenticmedia.co.uk/AuthenticSite/product/9781842273906.htm.

Jonathan Edwards and Scotland conference

2009-04-07T11:58:00.002+01:00

I'm in the middle of a run of conferences at the minute; I'll blog about each of them over the next couple of weeks. Spent the first part of last week in Glasgow at the Jonathan Edwards and Scotland conference [http://www.gla.ac.uk/events/jonathanedwardsandscotland/], jointly organised by the Jonathan Edwards at Yale and Glasgow University as part of the Scotland Homecoming Year celebrations. Met some great people and heard some really useful papers. I gave a paper on Edwards' influence in Wales, particularly among the Calvinistic Methodists in the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to his influence on Howel Harris and William Williams, Pantycelyn. Seemed to be well received, although I think it will need quite a bit of further research if I decide to write it up into a more substantial article. Having said that, I may just include parts of it in the book I’m currently writing about Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales in the long eighteenth century.

The highlight of the conference for me was David Bebbington's paper on different kinds of religious revivals. David came up with a taxonomy which classified evangelical religious revivals into five different kinds or varieties. I'm sure this will be widely used by historians once it appears in print; it certainly has the potential to be as useful as the well-known Bebbington quadrilateral definition of Evangelicalism! Other highlights included Michael McClenahan's paper on John Tillotson's role as a key champion of Arminianism in England and America and Caleb Maskel's paper on the way in which Edwards' writings have been used by exponents of the Toronto Blessing and other contemporary revivals! I was less keen on some of the papers dealing with Edwards' philosophical ideas, but that’s more down to my ignorance I guess!