CURRENT READING

Currently, my research and reading focus is on all things Millennial and POMO as I work towards a block of instruction for the Army. The target audience will be chaplains and chaplain assistants at their annual sustainment training. The goal is to provide them some tools for “nurturing a new generation.” However, I took a brief hiatus to read/re-read some other works that grabbed my interest.

First, I managed to get a replacement copy of Lefferts A. Loetscher’s The Broadening Church. Loetscher analyzes key trends in American Presbyterianism, beginning with the merger of the Old School- New School in 1869/1870. He traces the entrance of critical ideas into the church via Charles A. Briggs at Union Seminary and Henry P. Smith at Lane Seminary. These events were the background noise to what became the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, resulting in the affirmation of the Five Fundamentals (including inerrancy) at the General Assemblies of the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1910, 1916, and 1923.
Also of consequence was the Harry Emerson Fosdick case at New York’s First Church. Other key events: the death of B. B. Warfield in 1921 (largely because his mantle as champion of biblical inerrancy and Old School Calvinism fell to J. Gresham Machen), the Auburn Affirmation in 1924, the reorganization of Princeton Seminary, 1929, and the trials/defrocking of Machen and others in 1936 over the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Loetscher is quite satisfied with the excision of the “extreme conservatives” who resisted the “moderate, mediating policies which had always finally triumphed in the Church’s crises” (155).
Loefferts was the apologist for the moderate liberalism of the reunited church. One wonders if he would recognize the church today. The one theme that runs through much of the book is how frequently good, orthodox men, either because of lack of discernment or backbone, became the standard-bearers for the “moderate, mediating policies” of those who despised the Old School Calvinism of Old Princeton. Men who might have made a difference instead became weary of the struggle and sought means of accommodating those whose legacy is now the theologically bankrupt Presbyterian Church of the 21st century. I believe there are pertinent lessons here for my own denomination.

The second volume I read was new to me, but apparently a classic. Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again examines Fundamentalism in the wake of the Scopes Trial. Carpenter contends that rather than become dispirited over its apparent defeats, Fundamentalism was a creative force that developed new strategies and new outlets for its evangelical commitments. Among these he includes the rise of: Fundamentalist radio ministries, Youth for Christ, World Vision, Fuller Seminary, the NAE, and Billy Graham. Carpenter is a sympathetic writer who understands the piety and ethos of Fundamentalism, recognizing its genuine accomplishments as well as its inherent drawbacks. I read this book in two evenings straight. I have a great interest in so many of the topics and issues Carpenter discusses. His writing is clear and draws the reader in through his mastery of detail and ability to weave together so many separate, but related strands of history and biography. A must read for anyone interested in this period.

The third volume was a novel by Shirley Nelson, The Last Year of the War. This is a story of a young woman, Jo, a recent convert to Christianity, who moves to Chicago for the 1944-45 school year at Chicago Bible Institute (a thinly disguised Moody Bible Institute). Her family is not Christian, though her grandfather had once been a preacher. Her brother is an Army Air Corps navigator, now missing in action in the European Theater of Operations. Nelson is masterful at capturing the flavor of Fundamentalist zeal, commitment . . . and inconsistency. There are a number of characters that play prominent roles, including a young man who straddles the line between fervor and fanaticism (until fanaticism wins out); Dr. Peckham, who is the quintessential forgetful scholar; and a coterie of young women in her dorm who run the gamut of the characters one would expect to find at a mid-1940s Bible Institute.
Nelson develops Jo’s struggles with her faith as she deals with illness, family opposition, the unstated fear that her brother is dead, and the existential struggle to validate that her faith is real and not illusory. Jo is a sympathetic flesh and blood figure, with real fears and anxieties, not some unalloyed mythical ideal. Nelson’s snapshot of Fundamentalism at this particular time in this particular place is vivid, engaging, and as far as I can tell, true to life, without excessive caricature. As a work of fiction, it is lifelike without falling becoming overly pedantic or formulaic. For anyone interested in the “feel” of Fundamentalism, I am unaware of anything that would do a better job.