Theology, Ethics, and Apologetics

In theology and the closely related disciplines of apologetics and ethics, 1972 was productive but seldom original. No new systematic theology was presented, but two nineteenth-century Presbyterian classics, one from Richmond, the other from Princeton, were reprinted by Zondervan: the century’s leading Southern Presbyterian, Robert L. Dabney, who served as Stonewall Jackson’s chaplain and chief of staff, is represented by Lectures in Systematic Theology, and his younger Princeton Seminary counterpart, Archibald Alexander Hodge, by Outlines of Theology. Both works are of more than just historical value.

Under the general editorship of John P. Whalen and Jaroslav Pelikan, Westminster published four more volumes designated “Theological Resources.” One, Biblical Inspiration by Bruce Vawter, is an examination of the authority of Scripture from a Roman Catholic perspective. Drawing heavily on early theologians and generally sustaining the divine responsibility for and authorship of what Scripture teaches, Vawter parries liberal and existentialist tendencies without presenting a fully developed statement himself. A second volume, Jan Walgrave’s Unfolding Revelation, is really devoted to the development of doctrine, and makes an effort to absorb much that earlier Catholics would have abhorred, including the experiences of both Protestants and atheists, into a kind of history of philosophy-cum-theology with development as its leitmotif. More encyclopedic and less concerned with a single theme is Edmund J. Fortman’s history of trinitarian doctrine, The Triune God. Substantial and solid in dealing with the early Church, the Latin Middle Ages, and Roman Catholicism, the book is skimpy on Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism. It is nevertheless a valuable compendium. The only book of the four by a Protestant, John Macquarrie’s Existentialism, offers a detailed and helpful discussion of both its secular and the religious representatives.

Another ambitiously conceived project, Herder and Herder’s “Philosophy of Religion” series, edited by a formerly evangelical Protestant, John Hick, is less foundational. It includes the militantly atheistic Contemporary Critiques of Religion (especially hard on neo-orthodoxy and dialectical theology) by Kai Nielsen, and the less negative epistemological study Problems of Religious Knowledge by Terence Penelhum. Philosophy of Religion: The Historic Approaches by M. J. Charlesworth is generally favorable to biblical religion. Finally, there is a specialized study of religious polemics, Oppositions of Religious Doctrines by William A. Christian.

For Sheed and Ward, Martin Redfern edited an eight-volume series, “Theologians Today,” offering brief representative selections from influential contemporary Roman Catholic writers: F. J. Sheed, von Balthasar, Küng, Durwell, Karl Rahner, Congar, de Lubac, and Schille-beeckx. For Word’s “Makers of the Modern Theological Mind,” Bob E. Patterson edited studies on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Dallas M. Roark), Karl Barth, (David L. Mueller), and Rudolph Bultmann (Morris Ashcraft). The studies are readable and informative but less alert to anti-evangelical elements in their teachings than one would expect from the publisher. Fortress offered the first English translation of Three Essays by Albert Ritschl, an influential German of the last century who tried to stem the tide of skepticism flooding the biblical disciplines by emphasizing personal faith and the continuity of corporate Christian experience. These essays are a valuable document but no solution to the problem of theological liberalism.

Among recent theological figures, Bonhoeffer has received by far the most attention, and there were several other books on him in addition to Roark’s essay last year. Bonhoeffer’s twin sister Sabine Leibholz-Bonhoeffer offered The Bonhoeffers: Portrait of a Family (St. Martin’s), dealing chiefly with their childhood and early youth. Larry L. Rasmussen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance (Augsburg), is the most perceptive study of his views on pacificism, tyrannicide, and political resistance in general available to date. Bonhoeffer’s own Letters and Papers From Prison was reprinted in a slightly revised edition (Macmillan). Heinrich Ott, Karl Barth’s successor at Basel, offers a ponderous analysis, more Ott than Bonhoeffer, in Reality and Faith: The Theological Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Fortress), and incidentally presents, against the background of Bonhoeffer’s real or assumed importance, the struggles and structures of most of the more important German theologians who have survived or followed him.

Altogether different in size and intent, and generally reliable despite the author’s unconcealed admiration for his subject, is James F. Anderson’s Paul Tillich: Basics in His Thought (Magi), a useful eighty-three-page summary. In Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Abingdon) Ronald H. Stone gives a thorough presentation of the social, economic and political thought of America’s politically most influential theologian. Moving back in time, Gerhard O. Forde, in Where God Meets Man: Luther’s Down-to-Earth Approach to the Gospel (Augsburg), makes some valid points about the German Reformer’s hearty this-worldliness, but overstates the case in an effort to make Luther a forerunner of a kind of secular theology.

PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY In the area of philosophical theology, the outstanding offering is by Anglo-Catholic theologian Eric L. Mascall, one of the ablest representatives of the Thomist tradition today. In The Openness of Being: Natural Theology Today (Westminster) he defends not only the traditional cosmological argument for the existence of God but also the metaphysical approach to theology in general, and specifically hammers Leslie Dewart’s relativistic view of truth and the process theology inspired by Whitehead and Hartshorne. More limited in his approach, Bruce R. Eichenbach makes an impressive attempt to reassert The Cosmological Argument (Charles C. Thomas), not as though he could convert unbelievers but to show that faith and reason “are not such strange bedfellows.”

On the frontier between theology and philosophy is Method in Theology by Bernard Lonergan (Herder and Herder), the most prominent North American Roman Catholic theologian. By no means a guide to traditional theological disciplines, it is instead an intensive and difficult introduction to Lonergan’s distinctive approach to the knowledge of God, using his understanding of our self-awareness and awareness of others as well as the religious and poetic symbolism of many cultures. A more easily digestible introduction to Lonergan is furnished by the collection of essays Foundations of Theology, edited by Philip McShane (Notre Dame).

For those who found Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, a source of much existentialist theology, heavy going, Harper issued four essays under the title On Time and Being, a smaller draught from the same keg (eighty-two pages). Not Heidegger’s but the linguistic philosophers’ concern with language and religion is reflected in a number of studies. An excellent brief presentation, exposing some of the fatuities of the school, is Religious Language and Knowledge, edited by Robert H. Ayers and William T. Blackston (University of Georgia). John Donnelly mounts a bigger attack on the school in Logical Analysis and Contemporary Theism (Fordham), essays by several of the most competent defenders of traditional theological approaches, especially the proofs of God’s existence. Paul M. van Buren, who bought the linguistic-analytical package in 1963, cunningly tries to restore some value to the language of Christianity in The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of Religion (Macmillan), via its supposed analogies to pun, poetry, and paradox.

Overcoming some of the arid sophistries of the linguistic analysts thanks to Whitehead’s concept of process, Lyman T. Lundeen explores Risk and Rhetoric in Religion (Augsburg), but only offers us some insights into the contextual authenticity of religious discourse, without facing up to the challenge of propositional revelation. Less hopeful and still on a tangent to the real question about the living God of revelation is Gordon D. Kaufmann’s erudite discussion God the Problem (Harvard), a detailed study of the possibility of faith that overestimates the secularization of the modern mind and the persuasiveness of logical analysis, and offers a complex solution to their contrived problems. Roman Catholic statistician Andrew M. Greeley, in Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion (Schocken), refutes “the pop sociological-religious analysis which has become part of the American intellectual preconscious,” and maintains that the secular theologians are badly mistaken in their view of the mind of modern man. Greeley does not defend Christian doctrine, but this book is a valuable corrective to many widespread modern myths.

A diametrically different but more valuable approach to the problem of religious language and communication is S. U. Zuidema, Communication and Confrontation: A Philosophical Appraisal and Critique of Modern Society and Contemporary Thought (Wedge), essays dealing with trends in theology and philosophy (including Marxism) and offering valuable critiques of influential modern thinkers from a strict Calvinist perspective. Simple and cutting to the quick of the question about God’s communication to man is Francis A. Schaeffer’s He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Tyndale House), a brief but essential keystone to the structure begun in Escape From Reason and continued in The God Who Is There.

Summaries of doctrine are proposed by John Macquarrie and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Macquarrie’s The Faith of the People of God: A Lay Theology (Scribner) offers existentialist views while playing down their clash with orthodoxy. In The Apostles’ Creed in the Light of Today’s Questions (Westminster) Pannenberg faces up to the conflicts between faith and modern thought with a skilled defense of important traditional doctrines, brief and readable.

PARTICULAR DOCTRINES G. C. Berkouwer continues his “Studies in Dogmatics” with The Return of Christ (Eerdmans), a thorough, solid, almost 500-page examination of the element of the Christian hope that is attracting widespread attention; he gives detailed attention to non-Christian millennialistic hopes and repudiates universalism, relegating differences among Christians about the millennial reign of Christ to a secondary place. Almost as massive is Francis Nigel Lee’s doctoral dissertation, The Covenantal Sabbath: The Weekly Sabbath Scripturally and Historically Considered (London: Lord’s Day Observance Society), with valuable insights into the providential significance of the Sabbath to man and society today.

Repeating most of the self-assured errors of the Honest to God school and concentrating on its themes, but with occasional flashes of orthodoxy, is Christ, Faith, and History: Cambridge Studies in Christology, edited by S. W. Sykes and J. P. Clayton (Cambridge). J. P. Kenny in The Supernatural: Medieval Theological Concepts to Modern (Alba) helpfully discusses much misunderstood theological concepts and, in the last quarter of his book, gives a positive if not altogether convincing evaluation of Teilhard de Chardin as not really as anti-supernaturalist as generally supposed. A useful evaluation of Barth’s peculiarly elusive concept of revelation is offered by H. Martin Rumscheidt in Revelation and Theology (Cambridge); he uses an exchange of letters between Barth and his teacher Adolf von Harnack to show where liberals (and often evangelicals too) have difficulty with Barth.

The Church was the subject of several works, most notable being Eastern Orthodox archbishop Methodios Fouyas’s Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism (Oxford), especially valuable for the insight it offers into the Orthodox criticisms of Rome, generally unknown among Protestants. Liberal Roman Catholic scholar Gregory Baum, in New Horizons: Theological Essays (Paulist), points the way in which the more moderate radicals would like to see their church develop. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ably discussed from a somewhat spiritualizing perspective by Vernard Eller in In Place of Sacraments (Eerdmans). Warren A. Quanbeck’s Search For Understanding: Lutheran Conversations With Reformed, Anglican, and Roman Catholic Churches (Augsburg) predictably deals with formal structure and with theological approaches rather than with the content and truthfulness of the various churches’ messages.

H. A. Williams deals with the meaning of resurrection of the body in True Resurrection (Holt), a book that is not without helpful insights but owes far more to modern psychological theories about man than to the Eastern church fathers whom Williams praises. Marcus Barth’s Justification: Pauline Texts Interpreted in the Light of the Old and New Testaments (Eerdmans) is a short, useful study, largely limited to the Bible itself but marred by universalistic implications.

Several of these themes are more effectively summed up and made applicable to daily Christian living in one of Francis A. Schaeffer’s most significant books, True Spirituality (Tyndale), which is about the practical implications of biblical doctrines, not about mysticism. An opposite approach is taken by another American with ties to Switzerland, Episcopal clergyman Morton Kelsey, in Encounter With God: A Theology of Christian Experience (Bethany Fellowship), which attempts to bridge the gap between secular man and God by cultivating religious experience. Heavily influenced by C. G. Jung, Kelsey inclines to a kind of neo-Platonic Christianity; and while his suggestions may be helpful to those seeking to cultivate a Christian spiritual life, he does little to distinguish that which is specifically Christian from what Schaeffer would call “contentless mysticism.” Charles R. Meyer deals with the same subject in The Touch of God: A Theological Analysis of Religious Experience (Alba), but moves more exclusively in Roman Catholic paths and shuns modern psychologists; like Kelsey he offers little help in distinguishing Christian experience from surrogates. Karl Rahner offers, as Volumes VII and VIII of his Theological Investigations, two volumes entitled Further Theology of the Spiritual Life (Herder and Herder), that reflect a characteristically Roman Catholic concern with the life of the church, the sacraments, and worship in general but also go into some detail on the problem of living out Christian virtues as well as on the theological aspect of some currently popular topics, such as the self-understanding of woman. Rahner’s work is a better guide to Personality and the Christian Faith than the work bearing that name by Lowell G. Colston and Paul E. Johnson (Abingdon); it is remarkable that a book on this subject purportedly written for Christians can neglect the Bible and orthodox writers such as Jay E. Adams, and even Paul Tournier. Equally elusive as to what is specifically Christian, though writing as though Christian orthodoxy were to be taken for granted, is John Macquarrie in Paths in Spirituality (Harper & Row).

Richard R. Niebuhr offers in Experiential Religion (Harper & Row) an explanation of the quest for spiritual reality reflected in the preceding works, largely in terms of the bafflement and frustration men and women experience in trying to work out the ethical dimensions of faith and life vis-à-vis their fellows. The Reality of the Devil: Evil in Man by Ruth Nanda Anshen (Harper & Row) is, as the subtitle suggests, more concerned with the depth of the attraction within man to evil than with the Father of Lies himself; for Anshen, Satan appears more as symbol than as an independent reality.

The book of ecumenically favored Latin American Reubem Alves, Tomorrow’s Child (Harper & Row), is fascinated with the absurd, magic, and Marx, and concludes with Nietzsche’s promise that “the earth shall yet become a site of recovery … bringing salvation—and a new hope.” Offerings by theologians of hope are Time Invades the Cathedral by Walter H. Capps (Fortress), A House For Hope by William A. Beardslee (Westminster), and Theology of Play by Jürgen Moltmann (Harper & Row); the first two are typically more concerned with process than with Christian promise, and the third descends from mere inanities to contemptible blasphemies. Westminster also offers Beyond Cynicism: The Practice of Hope, by David O. Woodward, based on speculation more akin to Bloch than to the Bible. A panorama showing where celebrated, up-to-the-minute theologians think the divine future is taking us is offered by Ewert H. Cousins, editor of Hope and the Future of Man (Fortress), in which one contributor, Wolfhart Pannenberg, offers badly received objections to hope based on process theology. Another contributor to this volume, Carl E. Braaten, further explores “Apocalyptic Themes in Theology and Culture” in his monograph, Christ and Counter-Christ (Fortress), taking up the apocalyptic motif but not the specific content or the particular hope of Christian revelation.

Two brief biblical studies are A. A. van Ruler, The Christian Church and the Old Testament (Eerdmans), and C. K. Barrett, The Signs of an Apostle (Fortress). A significant contribution to the understanding of eschatology, more general in tone and dealing more fully with the current scene than Berkouwer’s book, is Lutheran Hans Schwarz’s On the Way to the Future (Augsburg), a strong and generally conservative presentation of Old and New Testament eschatological doctrine, and a description of the unacceptable current alternatives offered from within the Church and of “blind alleys” such as chiliasm and universalism.

APOLOGETICSThe God Who Makes a Difference: A Christian Appeal to Reason by Bernard L. Ramm (Word) will be a valuable tool for the Christian trying to give a reason for the hope that is in him; although Ramm takes the persuasion and witness of the Holy Spirit as his starting point, he might be accused of a tendency toward rationalism, and he does neglect to guard himself against criticism from the presuppositionalists; but this detracts very little from the book’s value as a tool. Not handbooks on apologetics, but apologies for the Christian faith are offered by a Roman Catholic and a German Protestant. Catholic George Devine’s Transformation in Christ (Alba) is a good presentation of basic Catholic doctrines, well written, with scant concessions to theological modernity, and revealing some of the best aspects of traditional Catholicism. In How to Believe Again (Fortress), West Germany’s best-known preacher, the hard-to-categorize Protestant theologian Helmut Thielicke, gives fifteen examples of his apologetic skill, several of them concentrating on the nature of faith.

In Christianity: A Historical Religion? (Judson) William Wand grapples effectively with what many moderns see as the Achilles’ heel of the Gospel, i.e., its link to scandalously specific persons, places, and deeds, and argues that this is instead precisely Christianity’s strength. In two Inter-Varsity paperbacks, J. N. Hawthorne deals effectively with Questions of Science and Faith and Hugh Silvester does the same with Arguing With God: A Christian Examination of the Problem of Evil. What Kind of God? A Question of Faith by Heinz Zahrnt (Augsburg), who effectively mass-marketed many previously obscure ineptitudes of more academic German radicals, is an unconvincing attempt to move back a little closer to historic Christianity without really abandoning his earlier infatuations—motivated perhaps by his new position as editor of the influential German periodical Sonntagsblatt. A far better statement of Christian basics is offered by Leslie H. Woodson in What You Believe and Why: Bible Doctrines Made Understandable to the Man-on-the-Street (Zondervan), with a helpful discussion of such contemporary topics as ecology and astrology. J. Oswald Sanders raps universalism in How Lost Are the Heathen? (Moody).

NON-CHRISTIAN VIEWS Of importance in an age of increasing syncretism and pantheism are books in comparative religion. Paul Younger’s Introduction to Indian Religious Thought (Westminster), deals primarily with Indian (essentially Hindu) philosophy while Herbert Stroup in Like a Great River (Harper & Row), discusses Hinduism’s history and cultic expression as well. Unlike Younger and Stroup, Douglas A. Fox in Buddhism, Christianity and the Future of Man (Westminster) ventures some theological criticism, albeit mild, of the non-Christian religion he describes. Westminster follows up Younger’s apology for Hinduism with Barry Wood’s plea for an Americanized version of this age-old rival to revealed religion, The Only Freedom, a curious offering from a Presbyterian press.

Humanistic pantheism is propounded by René Dubos in A God Within (Scribner), a title that might better suit Ian Kent and William Nicholls’s I AMness: The Discovery of the Self Beyond the Ego (Bobbs-Merrill), which despite the Christian Jewish background of its authors is also Westernized Indo-Aryan mysticism. Harper presents an original Indian contribution to the same mystic quest in J. Krishnamurti, You Are the World. An ambitious and thorough effort to classify and categorize this quest that includes but is not confined to Christianity is Louis Dupré, The Other Dimension: A Search For the Meaning of Religious Attitudes (Doubleday). Dupré stresses the psychological necessity of faith for an integrated life.

Atheism is dropping off as a topic of vital interest with the resurgence of superstition and occultism as a rival to faith, but 1972 saw the publication in English of Ernst Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity (Herder and Herder), in which the Marxist philosopher, who to some extent inspired the trend, attempts to help a certain school of “theologians” excise the doctrine of the personal, transcendent God from Christianity. A concise and provocative critique of modern atheism, suggesting that its own implications, if properly brought out, should drive us to reconsider personal theism, is Patrick Masterson’s Atheism and Alienation (Notre Dame).

ETHICS A late 1971 book, Robert E. Willis’s The Ethics of Karl Barth (Brill), is a first-class treatment of a formidable topic. Willis carefully builds up data for an ethical system from Barth’s immense body of original writings, and clearly shows that, far from being fragmentary, it is excessively uniformitarian—probably, the evangelical will deduce, as a result of Barth’s tendency to let his dialectic approach outweight the particularities of revelation. Also important is Paul Althaus, The Ethics of Martin Luther (Fortress). Althaus concisely presents the fundamental themes of Luther’s ethics; his discussion of Luther’s attitude towards the state and war seems especially timely today. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics by Bernard Williams (Harper & Row) is a helpful, brief treatment of ethics as a philosophical discipline.

In social ethics, the outstanding contributions are by Jacques Ellul, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man (Eerdmans), and J. N. D. Anderson, Morality, Law and Grace (Inter-Varsity). In a series of studies of Old Testament texts, Ellul demolishes much contemporary ecclesiastical and political nonsense. Anderson, with his usual clarity and faithfulness to Scripture, addresses himself to the relation between the will of God and human law.

A documentation of recent conflicts between the private religious conscience and public policy is given by Richard J. Regan in Private Conscience and Public Law: The American Experience (Fordham). Civil Disobedience and Political Obligation by James F. Childress (Yale) is an attempt to work out an ethical basis and responsible limits for civil disobedience in American society; clear and cogent, but one wonders whether its counsels of moderation can easily be heard. In Ethics and the Urban Ethos (Beacon) Max L. Stackhouse analyzes a number of influential motifs in the ethical thought of several Christian traditions. Although Stackhouse is not an evangelical, his faithful reflection of the history of Christian ethics can be very helpful to evangelicals. On the other hand, the programmatic work of James B. Nelson, Moral Nexus: Ethics of Christian Identity and Community (Nelson), remains too much on the level of moralizing derived from, but no longer intimately connected with, biblical revelation to be as useful. Essays by prominent liberal Christians, including George McGovern, are collected in Towards a Discipline of Social Ethics, edited by Paul Deats, Jr. (Boston University). In Imputed Rights: An Essay in Christian Social Theory (University of Georgia, 1971), Robert V. Andelson attempts to refute current assumptions about the nature and destiny of man and his rights and replace them with more valid ones, based on a Christian, broadly Calvinistic world view. His repudiation of much current secular orthodoxy that is also absorbed by Christians should be placed alongside Stackhouse’s description of the problems that face us.

Reacting against pietistic individualism, evangelicals continue their self-criticism, charging evangelicalism with accepting an unholy alliance in The Cross and the Flag, edited by Robert G. Clouse, Robert D. Linder, and Richard P. Pierard (Creation). A sharper and less nuanced attack is mounted by David O. Moberg in The Great Reversal: Evangelism Versus Social Concern, part of Lippincott’s “Evangelical Perspectives” series. Both this and The Cross and the Flag will appear more persuasive to readers living, like these authors, in the Middle West than to those in the East, but they should be read all over. Charles Y. Furness in The Christian and Social Action (Revell) tries to overcome the “reversal” of which Moberg speaks, not by surrendering any of pietism’s traditional preoccupation with the individual’s spiritual life but by insisting it must be developed into meaningful social involvement.

Of interest to our understanding of contemporary society and its problems are two from Arlington House. Duncan Williams in Trousered Apes: Sick Literature in a Sick Society offers a devastating analysis of contemporary culture, one that ought to strengthen the hand of Christians subject to intimidation by avantgarde literary and artistic pundits. Further documentation of the downward career of modern Gadarene swine comes in Boris Sokoloff’s The Permissive Society, a massive assault on Freudian morality and its dominance in American life.

Noteworthy among books on ecology is Christopher Derrick’s The Delicate Creation: Towards a Theology of the Environment (Devin-Adair), the most significant work on the subject since Francis Schaeffer’s Pollution and the Death of Man. Derrick, an orthodox Roman Catholic, is especially perceptive in identifying a Manichaean hatred for life as the source of much of our current perplexity.

Considerable attention, motivated by legal and sociological development in America, was devoted to the question of abortion in 1972, with the anti-abortion forces mounting a heavy barrage. Respectable Killing by K. D. Whitehead (Catholics United for the Faith) and The Death Peddlers by Paul Marx (St. John’s University) evoke, not without warrant, some of the most macabre aspects of current social trends. Handbook on Abortion by Dr. and Mrs. J. C. Wilke (Baker) gives, in considerable grisly detail, answers to factual questions about the medical, psychological, and legal aspects of abortion. David R. Mace in Abortion: The Agonizing Decision (Abingdon) attempts to grapple with the moral and psychological problem facing those procuring or performing abortions but does not fully face up to Christian imperatives. In Abortion: The Personal Dilemma (Eerdmans) a British gynecologist and minister, R. F. R. Gardner, goes in considerable detail into the moral issues from an evangelical perspective, and also explains how Britain’s permissive legislation has worked out in practice, much to the dismay of many of those who supported it; this is the most definitive Protestant book, though not entirely satisfactory to those who call for an unequivocal ban on abortion except where necessary to save the life of the mother. More theological, and giving the best Roman Catholic thinking not only on abortion but on other “life-engineering” issues such as euthanasia, is John F. Dedek in Human Life: Some Moral Issues (Sheed and Ward). A number of useful essays, and some bad ones, are edited by Michael Hamilton in The New Genetics and the Future of Man (Eerdmans).

The question of war is feelingly dealt with by Roger L. Shinn in Wars and Rumors of Wars (Abingdon); Shinn, a combatant in World War II, today takes a rather pacifistic stand. The current fashionableness of revolution, extending even into some evangelical circles, is exploded by Brian Griffiths in Is Revolution Change? (Inter-Varsity). In sexual ethics, perhaps the most perceptive book is Walter Trobisch’s I Married You, which draws from the author’s African experience lessons of value for the affluent West (Inter-Varsity).

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

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