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I have vivid memories of the 1947 Gordon Divinity School faculty family Christmas party. My missionary father, on extended health leave as he recovered from four years as a pow in China, was filling in for Paul King Jewett, then completing doctoral studies at Basle. That day as the children gathered for party games played out incongruously in the parlor of the Brookline mansion that was the home to the seminary, I was aware of a dark and brooding presence in a corner. Father of a boy not much older than I, he did not seem to be having much fun. Turns out, according to John D'Elia's biography, that Professor George Eldon Ladd (1911-1982) never did have much fun.
A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America is a gripping account of a man who was an integral part of the renaissance of postwar evangelical scholarship. That rebirth was accomplished, as is becoming evident from an increasing number of "tell-all" accounts, at great personal cost. (Whatever happened to fundamentalist hagiography?) Rudolph Nelson's 1987 classic The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The Case of Edward Carnell comes to mind. Edward John Carnell, Ladd's colleague and erstwhile boss at Fuller Seminary, likewise self-immolated. What was it about these men that drove them on in such intense psychic journeys?
The title of Ladd's biography answers the question: for his obsessive commitment to establishing his place at the table of scholarly and academic discourse, George Eldon Ladd paid a high price. D'Elia, senior pastor at the American Church in London, is to be commended for patient and well-documented research (the book began as a doctoral thesis with David Bebbington at Stirling). It is a story that needed to be told, though one hopes Ladd's deserved reputation will not be obscured by details of his tempestuous personal struggles, now fully disclosed.
Today, as D'Elia notes, no fewer than six George Eldon Ladd titles are still in print. This biography may be disquieting to some for whom Ladd was a pivotal figure in their educational and academic development. And there are many of them: he left an impressive number mentored over a quarter of a century of teaching at Fuller Seminary. Their names, as they are cited in the book, are a veritable who's who of contemporary evangelical scholarship. D'Elia's ultimate conclusion is that "George Ladd remains a pivotal figure in the postwar evangelical resurgence in America, and its most important Biblical scholar."
Ladd's story began with an unhappy childhood, summarized in the nickname he was given as he grew up: "Freak." He was born in rural Alberta, where his parents briefly alighted. His father was an itinerant doctor who, on return to New England, never settled anywhere for long. He found awkward young George an embarrassment. It would have been useful to know more about Dr. Elmer Ladd, a Yale medical school graduate. George's mother dealt with constant sickness and later was forced by economic necessity to work in a mill. His younger brother was everything that the father wanted and that Ladd wished he was.
At least that is the explanation that Ladd himself later provided for his complex personality. In a 1967 Fuller School of Psychology integration seminar presentation, Ladd spoke of growing up in "a home where there is no love," without "the security of parental affection." He described himself as "a lonely introvert who never can relate to people." An unsuccessful marriage, a son who was physically and psychologically damaged, and a daughter who kept her distance, compounded the family's dysfunctionality. Ladd's relationship with his wife limped along, with predictable guilt when she died. There was also an accelerating decline into the abyss of alcoholism, a disease he shared with his son. (In researching the life of C. Stacey Woods, I concluded that fundamentalist commitment to strict teetotalism provided little familiarity with the effects of alcohol when that taboo was broken.) D'Elia's use of the word "alcoholic," as well as his description of Ladd's marriage as teetering on the edge of divorce, will be challenged. But his portrait, as it unfolds, is carefully substantiated.
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